GyroSuite Turns a Polystyrene Sphere Into an Interactive 3D Handheld Spherical Display System
Using a project, shutter glasses, and a passive marker on the index finger, the system allows for easy interactivity across complex models.
Researchers from the University Grenoble Alpes have demonstrated an interactive, handheld 3D display platform dubbed GyroSuite — offering an easy way to interact with handheld perspective-corrected displays (HPCDs) for 3D visualization.
"Handheld Perspective-Corrected Displays (HPCDs) are physical objects that have a notable volume and that display a virtual 3D scene on their entire surface," the team explains. "Being handheld, they create the illusion of holding the scene in a physical container (the display). This has strong benefits for the intuitiveness of 3D interaction: manipulating objects of the virtual scene amounts to physical manipulations of the display."
"HPCDs have been limited so far to technical demonstrators and experimental tools to assess their merits. However, they show great potential as interactive systems for actual 3D applications. This requires that novel interactions be created to go beyond object manipulation and to offer general-purpose services such as menu command selection and continuous parameter control."
The team's work concentrates on a sphere-shaped HPCD designed to be held in both hands. With the display in-hand, users are able to rotate the display in order to occlude and reveal different parts of the underlying 3D model — and to prove its worth, the team came up with the perfect prototype use case: "We demonstrate," the researchers note, "how some of these techniques can be assemble in a self-contained anatomy learning application. Novice participants used the application in a qualitative user experiment. Most participants used the application effortlessly without any training or explanations."
The display itself, meanwhile, is relatively simple. A polystyrene sphere onto which the imagery is projected at around 90 dots per inch resolution, with off-the-shelf LCD shutter glasses used to create a stereoscopic 3D image. For interaction, the user is given a passive marker on the index finger of their dominant hand.
The team's work has been published as part of the proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST'20), and is available under open access terms on the ACM Digital Library.