Tabletop 3D Digital Map Interaction with Virtual Reality Handheld Controllers

Immersive technologies, such as virtual reality, enable users to view and evaluate three-dimensional content, e.g., geographic data. Besides navigating this data at a life-size scale, a tabletop display offers a better overview of a larger area. This paper presents six different techniques to interact with immersive digital map table displays, i.e., panning, rotating, and zooming the map and indicating a position. The implemented interaction methods were evaluated in a user study with 12 participants. The results show that using a virtual laser pointer in combination with the buttons and joystick on a controller yields the best results regarding interaction time, workload, and user preference. The user study also shows that interaction methods should be customizable so that users can adapt them to their abilities. However, the proposed virtual laser pointer technique achieves a good balance between physical and cognitive effort and yields good results for users with varying experience levels.