A Malleable Device with Applications to Sonification-based Data Exploration

This article introduces a novel human computer interaction device, developed in the scope of a Master’s Thesis. The device allows continuous localized interaction by providing a malleable interaction surface. Diverse multi-finger as well as multi-handed manipulations can be applied. Furthermore, the device acts as a tangible user interface object, integrated into a tangible computing framework called tDesk. Software to convert the malleable element’s shape into an internal surface representation has been developed. Malleable interactions are applied to a new Modelbased Sonification approach for exploratory data analysis. Highdimensional data are acoustically explored via their informative interaction sound in result to the user’s excitation.