Employing Dynamic Transparency for 3D Occlusion Management: Design Issues and Evaluation
Paper in proceeding, 2007

Recent developments in occlusion management for 3D environments often involve the use of dynamic transparency, or virtual “X-ray vision”, to promote target discovery and access in complex 3D worlds. However, there are many different approaches to achieving this effect and their actual utility for the user has yet to be evaluated. Furthermore, the introduction of semi-transparent surfaces adds additional visual complexity that may actually have a negative impact on task performance. In this paper, we report on an empirical user study comparing dynamic transparency to standard viewpoint controls. Our implementation of the technique is an image-space algorithm built using modern programmable shaders to achieve real-time performance and visually pleasing results. Results from the user study indicate that dynamic transparency is superior for perceptual tasks in terms of both efficiency and correctness.

3D environments

Information Visualization

dynamic transparency

occlusion

Author

Niklas Elmqvist

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computing Science (Chalmers)

Ulf Assarsson

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)

Philippas Tsigas

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computing Science (Chalmers)

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

03029743 (ISSN) 16113349 (eISSN)

Vol. 4662 532 - 545
978-3-540-74794-9 (ISBN)

Subject Categories

Computer Engineering

Software Engineering

Human Computer Interaction

Computer Science

ISBN

978-3-540-74794-9

More information

Created

10/7/2017