Benefits of Tablet Interfaces for Immersive Visualization in Information Visualization

This paper describes how tablets can be used to increase the interaction possibilities of virtual reality applications running on CAVE-like1 environments. A use case is presented using the genome comparison software 3DScover. The tablet interface has been introduced in a user-centric development environment. Multiple user studies have guided the evolution of the interface to ensure optimal ease of use. Our results indicate that the tablet provides useful input and output capabilities which are cumbersome to introduce in typical CAVE-like installations. The results should be extrapolable to other information visualization applications using virtual reality technology