Exploring Volume Visualization with Whole-hand Multitouch Gestures

Exploded views and cutaway views have been demonstrated to be powerful visualization techniques to explore the complex internal structures in 3D volume data. Current approaches for creating them are mainly based on algorithms with very limited user controls. This paper proposes a novel set of whole-hand multitouch gestures for interactive creation and manipulation of these views on 3D volume data. Moreover, users can also interactively perform bimanual ‘V’-shape cut and volume exploding, remove unwanted volume partitions to effectively create cutaway views, and create threshold-based volume segmentation and exploded views. Our proposed interaction design was also tried out by eight participants in a preliminary pilot study. Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): [I.3.6]: Computer Graphics—Interaction techniques 1