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Kinetic Skin is a thin, adhesive patch that employs resistive sensing via a meandering carbon ink trace, where the circuit designs are printed on temporary tattoo material, similar to ones worn by children for decorative play. Each tattoo sensor is worn on your body across a joint (ie. finger, wrist, and elbow joints). In this paper, we present implementation details of prototyping Kinetic Skin worn on the finger and wrist joints for relative tracking to control 6-DoF manipulation. We demonstrate translation, rotation, and scale of virtual objects, including camera navigation. In this paper, we describe four interaction techniques that map finger joint input to 6-DOF control. The potential of this technology could be used for long-term light weight tracking of body movements to inform rehabilitation; for dance, music, or other performing arts; for gaming; and for other 3D User Interaction in Virtual and Augmented Reality Applications.

This paper presents a novel interaction technique to combine multiple inputs and output modalities with a 3D printed open disc which is tracked and augmented with a virtual information. Props have been used in virtual and augmented environments to provide tangible associations to virtual elements. When used in a larger immersive environment or where a user is walking around, users may not have the capability to set these objects/props down or are limited to the number of hands, so users are reduced to the capability of using only two props or controllers. In our technique, users can instead use their body to store and organize the virtual objects associated with tangible props by physically hanging them on or attaching them to the body. This type of interaction is well-suited for both immersive visualizations and immersive virtual environments. In this paper, we present the results of an experimental evaluation of our Body Prop Interaction technique for each type of immersive environment and corresponding task type, demonstrating more effective usage in each scenario than a joystick or gesture-based interaction.

Prior work has shown that visual cues are more dominant than tactile cues for static objects. When texture and material properties are added, the reverse is true. However, it is not well understood which cues play a role in perceiving these textures when objects are moving. In this paper, we present an evaluation investigating speed and angular direction mismatch between visual and tactile information while objects are moving. Our results show that when objects are stationary or moving slowly, the sense of touch dominates visual cues; but as the speed increases, visual cues dominate tactile cues. When tactile and visual cues were not matching for moving virtual objects, visual cues were more dominant when the virtual objects moved at angles less than 30 degrees different than the tactile feedback in either direction. Therefore, potentially a 1D directional haptic device with physical texture substitutions may be able to convey sufficient realism when touching virtual objects that are moving faster than 4-8cm/s and with a difference in angular direction of 30 degrees or less. In this paper, we also present the limitations of this work and outline a research agenda for future investigation of visual and tactile cue dominance for perceiving textures of virtual objects moving in a virtual environment.

This paper presents the details of a novel selection technique, Physically-Based Volumetric Selection, to combat challenges in selecting volumes of data using immersive display spaces. We present results on a physical experiment that we used to inform design and discuss the details of our proposed technique. We also present the results of a virtual experiment to evaluate feasibility, utility, and usability. A description of user strategies and design is included. Our results will have implications for applications that use alternative rendering techniques as well as volume selection to assist with selection tasks in a physically-based manner. Our technique can be used in combination with other selection and manipulation techniques to improve the overall desired performance of volumetric selection.

Immersive Visualizations of 3-dimensional scientific data pose unique interaction challenges. One challenge is to be able to interact with the visual volumetric representations of data using direct manipulation in a way that facilitates exploration and discovery, yet maintains data relationships. In this paper, we present Body-Prop Interaction, a novel tangible multimodal interface for immersive visualizations. Our interaction technique combines multiple input and output modalities with 3D printed open discs that are tracked and augmented with virtual information. To demonstrate our technique, we implemented interactive tasks for a volume visualization of graphite billet data. While demonstrated for this type of data visualization, our novel interaction technique has the potential to be used to interact with other types of augmented and virtual reality.

In this poster, we present a novel 3-dimensional (3D) interaction technique, Altered Muscle Mapping (AMM), to re-map muscle movements of hands/arms to fingers/wrists. We implemented an initial design of AMM as a 3-Dimensional (3D) selection technique, where finger movements translate a virtual cursor (in 3-degrees-of-freedom) for selection. Direct Manipulation performance benefits may be preserved yet reduce physical fatigue. We designed an initial set of mapping variations. Our results from an initial pilot study provide initial performance insights of mapping configurations. AMM has potential for direct hand interaction in virtual and augmented reality and for users with a limited range of motion.

Collaboration among research scientists across multiple types of visualizations and platforms is useful to enhance scientific workflow and lead to unique analysis and discovery. However, current analytic tools and visualization infrastructure lack sufficient capabilities to fully support collaboration across multiple types of visualizations, display/interactive systems, and geographically distributed researchers. We have combined, adapted, and enhanced several emerging immersive and visualization technologies into a novel collaboration system that will provide scientists with the ability to connect with other scientists to work together across multiple visualization platforms (i.e. stereoscopic versus monoscopic), multiple datasets (i.e. 3-Dimensional versus 2-Dimensional data), and multiple visualization techniques (i.e. volumetric rendering versus 2D plots). We have demonstrated several use cases of this system in materials science, manufacturing, planning, and others. In one such use case, our collaboration system imports material science data (i.e., graphite billet) and enable multiple scientists to analyze and explore the density change of graphite across immersive and non-immersive systems, which will help to understand the potential structural problem in it. We recruited scientists that work with the datasets we demonstrate in three use case scenarios and conducted an experimental user study to evaluate our novel collaboration system on scientific visualization workflow effectiveness. In this paper, we present the results on task completion time, task performance, user experience, and feedback among multiple and feedback among multiple geographically distributed collaborators using different multiple-platform for collaboration.

There still lacks a collaborative framework that integrates existing and new virtual reality systems supporting remote collaboration for data visualization. The collaborative framework currently available might limit the collaborators for collaboration because it is not developed to support interaction with diverse 3D applications while using heterogeneous virtual reality (VR) systems remotely in a synchronized way. We will present our collaborative framework that supports remote collaboration across heterogeneous VR systems to interact with multiple 3D applications. This system is independent of any VR systems and can be used to interact collaboratively in real-time on a shared task. Additionally, we conducted a pilot study to gain perspective on the usability of the system for collaborative work across heterogeneous VR systems. We will present the results on the usability of the system, and the results obtained from the users are motivating and encouraging. Our system has the potential to increase task effectiveness and workflow because it enables shared and real-time interaction while remotely collaborating with diverse 3D applications across heterogeneous VR systems.

Data visualization and interaction is an important part of understanding and analyzing complex data. Immersive display systems provide benefits to exploration. In this paper, we present a user study to analyze co-located tasks and behaviors during a collaboration task. Results from this study helped us to identify patterns in co-located collaborative interaction to be able to better design remote collaborative environments. We discuss the challenges while interacting with data in an immersive data visualization environment and our design of a remote interactive collaboration framework for analysis and workflow of data visualizations. The goal of this framework is to preserve the benefits of physically co-located collaboration actions and add the benefits of virtual components that do not conform to real world restrictions.

3D applications appear in every corner of life in the current technology era. There is a need for an ubiquitous 3D input device that works with many different platforms, from head-mounted displays (HMDs) to mobile touch devices, 3DTVs, and even the Cave Automatic Virtual Environments. We present 3DTouch, a novel wearable 3D input device worn on the fingertip for 3D manipulation tasks. 3DTouch is designed to fill the missing gap of a 3D input device that is self-contained, mobile, and universally works across various 3D platforms. This paper presents a low-cost solution to designing and implementing such a device. Our approach relies on a relative positioning technique using an optical laser sensor and a 9-DOF inertial measurement unit. The device employs touch input for the benefits of passive haptic feedback, and movement stability. On the other hand, with touch interaction, 3DTouch is conceptually less fatiguing to use over many hours than 3D spatial input devices. We propose a set of 3D interaction techniques including selection, translation, and rotation using 3DTouch. An evaluation also demonstrates the device's tracking accuracy of 1.10 mm and 2.33 degrees for subtle touch interaction in 3D space. We envision that modular solutions like 3DTouch opens up a whole new design space for interaction techniques to further develop on. With 3DTouch, we attempt to bring 3D applications a step closer to users.

In this paper, we present an investigation on the performance effects of analytical tools through visual and non-visual interaction in an immersive visualization. We explored two types of touch-based input device (with a display screen as direct and without a display screen as indirect), and compared these two touch-based input devices with a 6-degrees of freedom (DOF) tracked input device and a 2DOF input device, where a user could interact in 6DOF spatial context but the degrees of freedom were constrained. The results revealed that for visually demanding tasks, touch input is comparable to 6DOF, however it is important to use physical means to constrain degrees of freedom to retain performance levels using analytical tools involving selection. Furthermore results revealed that precision can be negatively affected by the design of the direct touch interface. Our results will have implications on touch-based interface design as well as design considerations when reducing degrees of freedom control.

Multimodal systems have been previously used as an aid to improve quality and safety inspection in various domains, though few studies have evaluated these systems for accuracy and user comfort. Our research aims to combine our software interface designed for high usability with multimodal hardware configurations and to evaluate these systems to determine their user performance benefits and user acceptance data. We present two multimodal systems for using a novel system-directed interface to aid in inspecting vehicles along the assembly line: (1) wearable monocular display with speech input and audio output and (2) large screen display with speech input and audio output. We conducted two evaluations: (a) an experimental evaluation with novice users, resulting in accuracy, timing, user preferences, and other performance results and (b) an expert-based usability evaluation conducted on and off the assembly line providing insight on user acceptance, preferences, and performance potential in the production environment. We also compared these systems to current technology used in the production environment: a handheld display without speech input/output. Our results show that for visual and tactile tasks, benefits of system-directed interfaces are best realized when used with multimodal systems that reduce visual and tactile interaction per item and instead deliver system-directed information on the audio channel. Interface designers that combine system-directed interfaces with multimodal systems can expect faster and more efficient user performance when the delivery channel is different from channels necessary for task completion.

There are benefits for social and behavioral researchers to conduct studies in online virtual worlds. However, typically learning scripting takes additional time or money to hire a consultant. We propose a prototype Virtual World Toolkit for to help researchers design, set up, and run experiments in Virtual Worlds, with little coding or scripting experience needed. We explored three types of prototype designs, focused on a traditional interface with pilot results. We also present results of initial expert user study of our toolkit to determine the learnability, usability, and feasibility of our toolkit to conduct experiments. Results suggest that our toolkit requires little training and sufficient capabilities for a basic experiment. The toolkit received a great feedback from a number of expert users who thought that it is a promising first version that lays the foundation to more future improvements. This toolkit prototype contributes to enhancing researchers’ capabilities in conducting social/behavioral studies in virtual worlds and hopefully will empower social and behavioral researchers by proving a toolkit prototype that requires less time, efforts and costs to setup stimulus responses types of human subject studies in virtual worlds.