Tangible Braille Plot: Tangibly Exploring Geo-Temporal Data in Virtual Reality

Despite the resurgence of virtual reality (VR), the primary method of interacting with the environment is using generic controllers. Given the often-purpose-built nature of applications within VR, this is surprising, as despite the effort put into the design of the application itself, the same attention is not paid to the input control. This is despite the advantages that tangible interfaces have for user understanding, especially in the context of visualization, where user understanding is paramount. This paper presents the adaptation of a previous 2D temporal-geospatial visualization into VR, and more importantly, describes the development of a novel 8DOF Tangible User Interface developed to support the exploration of that data. For our application, this centers around the exploration of geospatial data to explore colocation and divergence of entities, but could easily be extended to other domains. We present our novel controller as an example of the benefits of the utilization of purpose built physical controllers as a first-tier method of enabling immersive analytics. We describe the immersive system and controller, followed by an example use case and other applications encouraging further development of novel tangibles as a key component of immersive data analytics.