Holes, Pits, and Valleys: Guiding Large- Display Touchless Interactions with Data-Morphed Topographies Abstract Large, high-resolution displays enable efficient visualization of large datasets. To interact with these large datasets, touchless interfaces can support fluid interaction at different distances from the display. Touchless gestures, however, lack haptic feedback. Hence, users’ gestures may unintentionally move off the interface elements and require additional physical effort to perform intended actions. To address this problem, we propose data-morphed topographies for touchless interactions: constraints on users’ cursor movements that guide touchless interaction along the structure of the visualized data. To exemplify the potential of our concept, we envision applying three data-morphed topographies—holes, pits, and valleys— to common problem-solving tasks in visual analytics. Author Keywords Touchless interactions; Large-display interfaces; Topography; Information Visualization. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.2 [User Interfaces]: Interaction styles. Introduction Visualization is increasingly moving off the desk to a large display environment and beyond the desktop to novel interaction modalities. Control rooms, meeting Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). UbiComp'14 Adjunct, September 13-17, 2014, Seattle, WA, USA ACM 978-1-4503-3047-3/14/09. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2638728.2638736 Debaleena Chattopadhyay (debchatt@iupui.edu) Said Achmiz (sachmiz@iupui.edu) Shivin Saxena (saxenash@iupui.edu) Malvika Bansal (bansalm@iupui.edu) Davide Bolchini (dbolchin@iupui.edu) Stephen Voida (svoida@iupui.edu) School of Informatics and Computing Indiana University 535 W. Michigan Street Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA. Figure 1. To guide touchless interactions, topographies such as holes (top), pits (middle), and valleys (bottom) overlay the visualized data. User’s cursor movement is modified as a function of the height maps, thus accelerating or decelerating cursor behavior appropriately. Accelerated Movement Decelerated Movement Unguided Movement