In “DABR – A multitouch system for intuitive 3d scene navigation ,” Jeorg Edelmann and Andreas Schilling of the University of Tubingen and Sven Fleck  of SmartSurv Vision Systems GmbH describe a system they built that allows for direct 3D scene manipulation in which the users’ fingers and the rendered 3D scene are closely coupled to extend benefits for 2D interaction to the 3D world.

Among the advantages of their approach are both temporal directness (low latency) which is addressed by a GPU accelerated image processing pipeline and spatial directness addressed by several novel navigation gestures.