MultiLens – Multi-Touch Lenses for Information Visualization

mulilensteaser

Interactive lenses have proven to be useful for many visualization applications where exploratory analysis is a primary task. Up to now, interaction with lenses is mostly limited to single-user, single-function lenses operated by mouse, keyboard and traditional parameter menus. To overcome these limitations, we propose MultiLens, touch-enabled magic lenses for fluently manipulating functions, parameters, and combinations of lenses on interactive surfaces. We contribute a novel multi-touch menu technique for magic lenses using a widget-based approach with a drag-snap slider for relative parameter adjustment. We also propose a continuous gesture set for rapidly changing lenses and their primary parameters in one seamless phrase. In addition, by supporting the combination of various lens functions, we create a generic multipurpose lens tool. We illustrate our approach by investigating and implementing the concepts for the field of graph exploration. The prototype was evaluated in a user study comparing it to global adjustment approaches with both mouse and
touch.

Basic Interaction Principle

multilens_basicinteractionprinciple

Drag Snap Technique

multilens_dragsnap

Video

Associated Publications

The following publications from the Interactive Media Lab Dresden are associated with the MultiLens project:

MultiLens: Fluent Interaction with Multi-Functional Multi-Touch Lenses for Information Visualization.
Kister, U.; Reipschläger, P.; Dachselt, R.;
In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces.ISS '16, Niagara Falls, ON, Canada.ACM,139-148,2016.10.1145/2992154.2992168
@inproceedings{Kister2016_MultiLens,
   author = {Ulrike Kister and Patrick Reipschl\"{a}ger and Raimund Dachselt},
   title = {MultiLens: Fluent Interaction with Multi-Functional Multi-Touch Lenses for Information Visualization},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces},
   year = {2016},
   month = {11},
   isbn = {978-1-4503-4248-3},
   location = {Niagara Falls, ON, Canada},
   pages = {139--148},
   numpages = {10},
   doi = {10.1145/2992154.2992168},
   url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2992154.2992168},
   acmid = {2992168},
   publisher = {ACM},
   address = {New York, NY, USA},
   keywords = {Multi-touch interaction, information visualization, magic lenses, focus+context, graph exploration, graph lenses}
}
Multi-Touch Manipulation of Magic Lenses for Information Visualization.
Kister, U.; Reipschläger, P.; Dachselt, R.;
In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces.ITS '14, Dresden, Germany.ACM,431-434,2014.10.1145/2669485.2669528
@inproceedings{kister-14-its,
   author = {Ulrike Kister and Patrick Reipschl\"{a}ger and Raimund Dachselt},
   title = {Multi-Touch Manipulation of Magic Lenses for Information Visualization},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces},
   year = {2014},
   month = {11},
   isbn = {978-1-4503-2587-5},
   location = {Dresden, Germany},
   pages = {431--434},
   numpages = {4},
   doi = {10.1145/2669485.2669528},
   url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2669485.2669528},
   acmid = {2669528},
   publisher = {ACM},
   address = {New York, NY, USA},
   keywords = {magic lenses, graph lenses, multi-touch interaction, information visulization}
}