Haptic Interaction Techniques for Exploring Chart Data

Haptic data visualization is a growing research area. It conveys information using the sense of touch which can help visually impaired people or be useful when other modalities are not available. However, as haptic devices and virtual worlds exhibit many challenges, the haptic interactions developed are often simple and limited to navigation tasks, preferring other modalities to relay detailed information. One of the principal challenges of navigation with haptic devices alone, particularly single point-based force-feedback devices, is that users do not know where to explore and thus obtaining an overview is difficult. Thus, this paper presents two types of interaction technique that aim to help the user get an overview of data: 1) a haptic scatter plot, which has not been investigated to any great degree, provided by a force model and 2) a new implementation for a haptic line chart technique provided using a guided tour model.