Prototype system for synergistic data display

Journal ArticleMultimodal interfaces have been shown to increase user performance for a variety of tasks. We have been investigating the synergistic benefits of haptic scientific visualization using an integrated, semi-immersive virtual environment. The Visual Haptic Workbench provides multimodal interaction; immersion is enhanced by head and hand tracking, haptic feedback, and additional audio cues. We present the motivation, design and implementation of the prototype system and describe some challenges ahead in the context of questions to be answered. Preliminary results indicate that visualization combined with haptic rendering intuitively conveys the salient characteristics of scientific data