Whole body interaction with geospatial data

Abstract

Common Geographic Information Systems (GIS) require a high degree of expertise from its users, making them difficult to be operated by laymen. This paper describes novel approaches to easily perform typical basic spatial tasks within a GIS: e.g. pan-, zoom- and selection-operations by using multi-touch gestures in combination with foot gestures. We are interested in understanding how non-expert users interact with such multi-touch surfaces. We provide a categorization and a framework of multi-touch hand gestures for interacting with a GIS. This framework is based on an initial evaluation. We present results of a more detailed in situ-study mainly focusing on multi-user multi-touch interaction with geospatial data. Furthermore we extend our framework using a combination of multi-touch gestures with a small set of foot gestures to solve geospatial tasks. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.