A novel multi-touch approach for 3D object free manipulation

In the field of scientific visualization, 3D manipulation is a fundamental task for many different scientific datasets, such as particle data in physics and astronomy, fluid data in aerography, and structured data in medical science. Current researches show that large multi-touch interactive displays serve as a promising device providing numerous significant advantages for displaying and manipulating scientific data. Those benefits of direct-touch devices motivate us to use touch-based interaction techniques to explore scientific 3D data. However, manipulating object in 3D space via 2D touch input devices is challenging for precise control. Therefore, we present a novel multi-touch approach for manipulating structured objects in 3D visualization space, based on multi-touch gestures and an extra axis for the assistance. Our method supports 7-DOF manipulations. Moreover, with the help from the extra axis and depth hints, users can have better control of the interactions. We report on a user study to make comparisons between our method and standard mouse-based 2D interface. We show in this work that touch-based interactive displays can be more effective when applied to complex problems if the interactive visualizations and interactions are designed appropriately.