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(a) the user points to the region where the
desired object is located; (b) starting a touch
rearrange the subset of objects pointed by
the volume casting technique over a selection
canvas; (c) the canvas has an absolute
mapping to the mobile device touchscreen,
the user slides his thumb in order to point
out the desired object and selects it with a
touch take off gesture
Difficulty of selection is proportional to
the amount of objects in the second step;
in (a), (b) and (c) there are 25, 97 and 224
objects, which were the distractors
densities used for preliminary evaluation
Disambiguation canvas is a
technique for selection by progressive
renement using a mobile device and
consisting of two steps. During the rst,
the user denes a subset of objects
through the orientation sensors of the
device and a volume-casting pointing
technique. The subsequent step consists
of disambiguating the desired object
from this subset using the mobile device
touchscreen.
Selection by progressive refinement
proposes the breakdown of a selection
task into effortless subtasks, avoiding
the attention and precision usually
required by traditional selection
techniques [3]. We use the observed
high precision of control provided by
the touchscreen [1, 2] to allow the
disambiguation of the desired object
among a subset of hundreds of other
objects in only one step of refinement.
Unitymol is a molecular and
biological network viewer developed
on the Unity 3D game engine. The
viewer allows access to the Worldwide
Protein Data Bank that contains over
60,000 high-resolution protein
structures available. The viewer focus
on molecular visualization using
surfaces, spheres and links between
them. An original algorithm based on
hardware capabilities sucha as GPU is
used to provide a realistic scenario,
based on current research.
Unitymol, besides the viewing allows
interaction with the molecules. It is
possible to translate and rotate
molecules with six degrees of freedom
to ease visualization. Integrating the
disambiguation canvas with Unitymol
has the potencial to provide a more
intuitive interaction with molecules.
Users may be unable to reach all the
touchscreen. Thus we defined two area
layouts (a and b) to limit the usable area,
and optionally a calibration procedure (c)
Three-dimensional gestures captured by
sensors in the smartphone combined
with the two-levels interaction of the
disambiguation canvas is expected to
provide better user performance and
experience in manipulating molecules.
Contact:
marcio.mello@inf.ufrgs.br
Graphical Methods Used: unitymol use the graphical resources available in
Unity 3D. Graphical primitives like sphere and cubes are used to render atoms (for
molecular structures) or nodes (for networks); links between them are rendered
using lines.

In this ongoing work, we plan to
iteratively evaluate and adapt the
disambiguation canvas design to better
fit the molecule manipulation task. The
resulting technique and an analysis of its
use as an interactive visualisation tool
will be presented in a near future.
Mrcio Mello, Henrique G. Debarba, Anderson Maciel
and Luciana Nedel
3 D I n t e r a c t i o n w i t h C l u t t e r e d
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