Touching the 3rd Dimension (T3D) - Design and Analysis of Perceptually-Inspired Interaction Concepts for Stereoscopic Multi-Touch enabled Surfaces

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Two technologies have dominated recent tech exhibitions as well as the entertainment market: multi-touch surfaces and 3D stereoscopic displays. Currently, these promising technologies are combined in different setups, and first commercial systems are available that support (multi-)touch interaction as well as stereoscopic display. Recent research projects address technological questions of how users interact with stereoscopically displayed three-dimensional content on a two-dimensional touch surface. The approach of combining multi-touch surfaces and 3D stereoscopic displays has great potential to provide plausible as well as natural interaction for a wide range of applications, e.g. in entertainment, planning and design, education, and decision-making. It can also be applied to different user interface systems ranging from 3D desktop environments to more immersive collaborative large tabletop or other projection-based setups. Although stereoscopic multi-touch enabled surfaces induce several perceptual conflicts, e.g. visual-haptic or accommodation-vergence conflicts, it is reasonable that they will further dominate future user interfaces in various settings due to their potential as well as attractiveness for human users. So far most approaches have not taken into account the mentioned perceptual conflicts and are in most cases limited in their focus on the actual moment of touch (i.e. when the finger touches the surface), whereas the essential time period before the touch is rarely considered. Obviously - in the case of stereoscopic display - these moments are particularly important since most virtual objects are rendered not on the surface, but before or behind it. Hence, usually touching virtual objects and touching the physical surface occur at different moments during the interaction. The benefits, challenges and limitations of using this combination have not been examined in-depth and are so far not well understood so far. The project Touching the 3rd Dimension (T3D) therefore aims to address these questions by analyzing the perceptual aspects during the lifetime of a touch, i.e. the pre-touch, as well as the actual touch phase. On the one hand we intend to design and evaluate different interaction concepts for stereoscopic multi-touch enabled surfaces based on perceptual limitations of the user, and on the other hand we will exploit our setup to gain novel insights into the nature of touch and perception in the real world. In addition we will explore potential application areas, in particular 3D modeling in the domains of city modeling and computer-aided design (CAD).