Short-Contact Touch-Manipulation of Scatterplot Matrices on Wall Displays

Abstract

This paper presents a short-contact multitouch vocabulary for interacting with scatterplot matrices (SPLOMs) on wall-sized displays. Fling-based gestures overcome central interaction challenges of such large displays by avoiding long swipes on the typically blunt surfaces, frequent physical navigation by walking for accessing screen areas beyond arm's reach in the horizontal direction and uncomfortable postures for accessing screen areas in the vertical direction. Furthermore, we make use of the display's high resolution and large size by supporting the efficient specification of two-tiered focus + context regions which are consistently propagated across the SPLOM. These techniques are complemented by axis-centered and lasso-based selection techniques for specifying subsets of the data. An expert review as well as a user study confirmed the potential and general usability of our seamlessly integrated multitouch interaction techniques for SPLOMs on large vertical displays.