Evaluation of hands-free HMD-based navigation techniques for immersive data analysis

• Published in: 2016 IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces (3DUI) pp. 113 - 119
• Main Authors: Zielasko, Daniel, Horn, Sven, Freitag, Sebastian, Weyers, Benjamin, Kuhlen, Torsten W.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-03-2016
• Subjects: Data analysis; Employment; Foot; H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces — Evaluation/methodology; Legged locomotion; Navigation; Smart phones; Visualization
• DOI: 10.1109/3DUI.2016.7460040

To use the full potential of immersive data analysis when wearing a head-mounted display, users have to be able to navigate through the spatial data. We collected, developed and evaluated 5 different hands-free navigation methods that are usable while seated in the analyst's usual workplace. All methods meet the requirements of being easy to learn and inexpensive to integrate into existing workplaces. We conducted a user study with 23 participants which showed that a body leaning metaphor and an accelerometer pedal metaphor performed best. In the given task the participants had to determine the shortest path between various pairs of vertices in a large 3D graph.