Heart-In-Hand, swapping point of view for immersive navigation in medical cardiology

This work shows an interaction technique that allows the user to swap between egocentric and exocentric points of view while performing an anatomic navigation task inside the human heart. To achieve this, we propose a technique that furnishes the user with a natural interaction supported by two components. The first is a tangible heart representation that the user may manipulate with their hands in an exocentric view; the second is a set of manual gestures that provide locomotion actions in an egocentric view and allow the user to swap between the points of view. Two classic 3D interaction techniques inspire this work: i) World In Miniature and ii) Voodoo Dolls, extending them with natural interaction components. The preliminary tests showed that the proposed approach allows users to take advantage of an immersive first-person viewer of the heart using the third-person view to get a global point of view without missing the anatomic location inside the heart.