Abstract We study tangible touch tablets combined with Augmented Reality Head‐Mounted Displays (AR‐HMDs) to perform spatial 3D selections. We are primarily interested in the exploration of 3D unstructured datasets such as cloud points or volumetric datasets. AR‐HMDs immerse users by showing datasets stereoscopically, and tablets provide a set of 2D exploration tools. Because AR‐HMDs merge the visualization, interaction, and the users' physical spaces, users can also use the tablets as tangible objects in their 3D space. Nonetheless, the tablets' touch displays provide their own visualization and interaction spaces, separated from those of the AR‐HMD. This raises several research questions compared to traditional setups. In this paper, we theorize, discuss, and study different available mappings for manual spatial selections using a tangible tablet within an AR‐HMD space. We then study the use of this tablet within a 3D AR environment, compared to its use with a 2D external screen.

In Augmented Reality (AR), users perceive virtual content anchored in the real world. It is used in medicine, education, games, navigation, maintenance, product design, and visualization, in both single-user and multi-user scenarios. Multi-user AR has received limited attention from researchers, even though AR has been in development for more than two decades. We present the state of existing work at the intersection of AR and Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (AR-CSCW), by combining a systematic survey approach with an exploratory, opportunistic literature search. We categorize 65 papers along the dimensions of space, time, role symmetry (whether the roles of users are symmetric), technology symmetry (whether the hardware platforms of users are symmetric), and output and input modalities. We derive design considerations for collaborative AR environments, and identify under-explored research topics. These include the use of heterogeneous hardware considerations and 3D data exploration research areas. This survey is useful for newcomers to the field, readers interested in an overview of CSCW in AR applications, and domain experts seeking up-to-date information.

We present an observational study with domain experts to understand how augmented reality (AR) extensions to traditional PC-based data analysis tools can help particle physicists to explore and understand 3D data. Our goal is to allow researchers to integrate stereoscopic AR-based visual representations and interaction techniques into their tools, and thus ultimately to increase the adoption of modern immersive analytics techniques in existing data analysis workflows. We use Microsoft's HoloLens as a lightweight and easily maintainable AR headset and replicate existing visualization and interaction capabilities on both the PC and the AR view. We treat the AR headset as a second yet stereoscopic screen, allowing researchers to study their data in a connected multi-view manner. Our results indicate that our collaborating physicists appreciate a hybrid data exploration setup with an interactive AR extension to improve their understanding of particle collision events.

Abstract We discuss spatial selection techniques for three‐dimensional datasets. Such 3D spatial selection is fundamental to exploratory data analysis. While 2D selection is efficient for datasets with explicit shapes and structures, it is less efficient for data without such properties. We first propose a new taxonomy of 3D selection techniques, focusing on the amount of control the user has to define the selection volume. We then describe the 3D spatial selection technique Tangible Brush, which gives manual control over the final selection volume. It combines 2D touch with 6‐DOF 3D tangible input to allow users to perform 3D selections in volumetric data. We use touch input to draw a 2D lasso, extruding it to a 3D selection volume based on the motion of a tangible, spatially‐aware tablet. We describe our approach and present its quantitative and qualitative comparison to state‐of‐the‐art structure‐dependent selection. Our results show that, in addition to being dataset‐independent, Tangible Brush is more accurate than existing dataset‐dependent techniques, thus providing a trade‐off between precision and effort.