Haptic and gesture-based interactions for manipulating geological datasets

In this paper, we report the first step of our ongoing research toward the creation of an intuitive and interactive environment for manipulating and analyzing geological datasets. This first step of our project aimed at the development of a manipulation system through the employment of haptic sense and gesture detection, into a virtual environment. The developed prototype integrates stereoscopic interactive visual rendering, haptic feedback and real-time hand tracking via a range camera, in a multithreaded architecture. Our prototype has been tested with both a synthetic 3D terrain and geological datasets. Our first results confirm the effectiveness of the selected architecture.