A Gesture System for Graph Visualization in Virtual Reality Environments

Abstract

As virtual reality (VR) hardware technology becomes more mature and affordable, it is timely to develop visualization applications making use of such technology. How to interact with data in an immersive 3D space is both an interesting and challenging problem, demanding more research investigations. In this paper, we present a gesture input system for graph visualization in a stereoscopic 3D space. We compare desktop mouse input with gesture input with bare hands for performing a set of tasks on graphs. Our study results indicate that users are able to effortlessly manipulate and analyze graphs using gesture input. Furthermore, the results also show that using gestures is more efficient when exploring the complicated graph.