Paper Reading #11: Multitoe

References
Thomas Augsten, et al.  "Multitoe: high-precision interaction with back-projected floors based on high-resolution multi-touch input". UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23rd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology.  ACM New York, NY, USA ©2010.

Author Bios
Thomas Augsten, Konstantin Kaefer, are a master student of IT systems at Hasso Plattner Institute (University of Potsdamn) in Germany.

Christian Holz is a Ph. D. student in Human Computer Interaction at the Hasso Plattner Institute. He believes the only way to continue to further miniaturize mobile devices is to fully understand the limitations of human computer interaction. 

Patrick Baudisch is a professor in Computer Science at the Hasso Plattner Institute.

Rene Meusel, Caroline Fetzer, Dorian Kanitz, Thomas Stoff, and Torsten Becker are students at the Hasso Plattner Institute.

Summary

• Hypothesis - Using foot input is an effective way to interact with a back-projected floor based computer.
• Method - The first study conducted was intended to be built off of for subsequent experiments. It was to test how buttons could be intentionally walked over without activating them. Participants were asked to walk over 4 buttons, two of which were meant to be activated, 2 of which were not. User methods were recorded and categorized. The second study determined which area of the foot user expected to be detected to activate a button. The third study was to determine if there was consistency in preferred hotspots across the user base. The fourth was meant to determine user ability; they were asked to type a sentence using a projected keyboard.
• The results for the first test were that users did not generally have a consistent way to activate buttons. In the second test, most users agreed that the foot's arch was the best way to activate a button. The third test showed that users had virtually no agreement between users; no hotspots had the majority of usage. In the fourth test, it was found (as expected) that the smaller the keyboard, the more errors the user made. Users were about even in their preferences of the medium and large keyboards.

Discussion
While I'm not sure that this technology has immediate application, I believe that this could be one of the first steps to virtual reality rooms. I really enjoyed the concept, although I'm not sure that the users enjoyed it as much as me. Current uses may be exploring maps, or games such as Dance Dance Revolution, or if they include multi touch (with a large amount of possible touches) it could support group activities or games.