GeoTUI: A Tangible User Interface for Geoscience

Nadine Couture (1) , Guillaume Rivière (1, 2) , Patrick Reuter (2, 3)

1 ESTIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
2 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique
3 IPARLA - Visualization and manipulation of complex data on wireless mobile devices

GeoTUI is a system designed for geophysicists that provides props as tangible user interface on a tabletop vision-projection system for the selection of cutting planes on a geographical map of a subsoil model. Our GeoTUI system allows the geophysicists to manipulate in the same action and perception space since the movement of the physical artifacts is done on the tabletop and thus constrained to two dimensions. Consequently, it combines the advantages of the spontaneous conditions of user interaction that the geophysicists are commonly used to in their classical paper/pen/ruler environment with the advantages of the use of powerful geological simulation software. We conducted an extensive user study in the workplace of the geophysicists that clearly revealed that using a tangible interaction performs better than using the standard mouse/keyboard GUI for the cutting line selection task on a geographical subsoil map. Consequently, it increases the efficiency for the real-world trade task of hypothesis validation on a subsoil model. Moreover, this geological user case is complex enough to confirm the hypothesis that in space-multiplex conditions, specialized devices perform better than generic ones.

Mots clés: TUI; tabletop; user study; geoscience; Author Keywords TUI; two-handed interaction; geoscience ACM Classification Keywords H52 [Information interfaces and presentation]: User Interfaces-user-centered design; interaction styles; evaluation/methodology; input devices and strategies

Domaines: Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]

Nadine Couture, Guillaume Rivière, Patrick Reuter. GeoTUI: A Tangible User Interface for Geoscience. TEI'08, 2nd International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction, Feb 2008, Bonn, Germany. pp.89-96, ⟨10.1145/1347390.1347411⟩. ⟨hal-00203047⟩