Immersive environments offer new possibilities for exploring three-dimensional volumetric or abstract data. However, typicalmid-air interaction offers little guidance to the user in interacting with the resulting visuals. Previous work has explored the use of hapticcontrols to give users tangible affordances for interacting with the data, but these controls have either: been limited in their range andresolution; were spatially fixed; or required users to manually align them with the data space. We explore the use of a robot arm withhand tracking to align tangible controls under the user’s fingers as they reach out to interact with data affordances. We begin witha study evaluating the effectiveness of a robot-extended slider control compared to a large fixed physical slider and a purely virtualmid-air slider. We find that the robot slider has similar accuracy to the physical slider but is significantly more accurate than mid-airinteraction. Further, the robot slider can be arbitrarily reoriented, opening up many new possibilities for tangible haptic interaction withimmersive visualisations. We demonstrate these possibilities through three use-cases: selection in a time-series chart; interactiveslicing of CT scans; and finally exploration of a scatter plot depicting time-varying socio-economic data
Funding agencies: . This research was supported under the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projectsfunding scheme (project number DP180100755) and the Knut andAlice Wallenberg Foundation (grant KAW 2019.0024)