Leveraging Body Interactions to Support Immersive Analytics

New immersive devices (e.g., virtual or augmented reality) enable displaying large amounts of data in space to better support data analysis. Manipulating this data efficiently is crucial, but challenging because the user must be able to activate various commands or adjust various values while remaining free to move. Using the whole body offers several valuable advantages: 1) The body provides a physical support as an interactive surface, which improves accuracy and makes it less tiring to interact; 2) Using the body does not impair mobility and avoids handling devices; 3) Proprioception makes it possible to interact eyes-free, including for choosing values in a range; 4) By leveraging spatial memory, the body helps memorizing commands, thus interacting in expert mode (i.e., perform quick actions without visual feedback). In this position paper, we analyze various ways of interacting with the body and discuss their advantages and challenges for immersive analytics.