Lonni Besançon

A Tangible Volume for Portable 3D Interaction

We present a new mixed reality approach to achieve tangible object manipulation with a single, fully portable, and self-contained device. Our solution is based on the concept of a “tangible volume.” We turn a tangible object into a handheld fish-tank display. Our approach, however, goes beyond traditional fish-tank VR in that it can be viewed from all sides, and that the tangible volume represents a volume of space that can be freely manipulated within a virtual scene. This volume can be positioned onto virtual objects to directly grasp them and to manipulate them in 3D space. We investigate this concept with a user study to evaluate the intuitiveness of using a tangible volume for grasping and manipulating virtual objects. The results show that a majority of participants spontaneously understood the idea of grasping a virtual object “through” the tangible volume.

Pressure-Based Gain Factor Control for Mobile 3D Interaction using Locally-Coupled Devices

We present the design and evaluation of pressure-based interactive control of 3D navigation precision. Specifically, we examine the control of gain factors in tangible 3D interactions using locally-coupled mobile devices. By focusing on pressure as a separate input channel we can adjust gain factors independently from other input modalities used in 3D navigation, in particular for the exploration of 3D visualisations. We present two experiments. First, we determined that people strongly preferred higher pressures to be mapped to higher gain factors. Using this mapping, we compared pressure with rate control, velocity control, and slider-based control in a second study. Our results show that pressure-based gain control allows people to be more precise in the same amount of time compared to established input modalities. Pressure-based control was also clearly preferred by our participants. In summary, we demonstrate that pressure facilitates effective and efficient precision control for mobile 3D navigation.

Reducing affective responses to surgical images through color manipulation and stylization

We present the first empirical study on using color manipulation and stylization to make surgery images more palatable. While aversion to such images is natural, it limits many peoples ability to satisfy their curiosity, educate themselves, and make informed decisions. We selected a diverse set of image processing techniques, and tested them both on surgeons and lay people. While many artistic methods were found unusable by surgeons, edge-preserving image smoothing gave good results both in terms of preserving information (as judged by surgeons) and reducing repulsiveness (as judged by lay people). Color manipulation turned out to be not as effective.

Combining tactile and tangible input for 3D selection

We present the design of a 6-DOF tangible controller for 3D spatial data selection. Such selection is a fundamental task in scientific visualization : it is performed prior to many other interactions. Many datasets are defined in 3D space, yet selection is often performed based on 2D input. While 2D-input-based selection may be efficient for datasets with explicit shapes, it is less efficient for data without such objects or structures. We then address this issue by combining 2D tactile with 3D tangible input to perform 3D selection in volumetric datasets.