Exploring tablet surrounding interaction spaces for medical imaging

Medical imaging is essential to support most diagnosis. It often requires visualizing individual 2D slices from 3D volumetric datasets and switching between both representations. Combining an overview with a detailed view of the data [1] enables to keep the user in context when looking in detail at a slice. Given both their mobility and their adequacy to support direct manipulation, tablets are attractive devices to ease imaging analysis tasks. They have been successfully combined with tabletops [3], allowing new ways to explore volumetric data. However, while touch allows for a more direct manipulation, it suffers from the well-known fat fnger problem which can interfere with the display, making it hard to understand subtle visual changes. To overcome this problem, we propose to explore the space around tablet devices. Such approach has been used for displays [2] to separate several workspaces of the desktop. Here, we use such space to invoke commands that are not required to be performed on the tablet, thus maximizing the visualization space during manipulations.