Paper Reading #22: Mid-air Pan-and-Zoom on Wall-sized Displays

References

Mathieu Nancel, Julie Wagner, Emmanuel Pietriga, Olivier Chapuis, and Wendy Mackay.  "Mid-air pan-and-zoom on wall-sized displays". UIST '11 Proceedings of the 23rd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology.  ACM New York, NY, USA ©2011.

 Author Bios

Mathieu Nancel is a Ph.D. student in HCI at the University Paris-Sud XI.

Julie Wagner is a Ph.D. student at the InSitu lab in Paris.

Emmanuel Pietriga is the interim leader of INRIA team in Situ where he is a full-time reasearch scientist.

Oliver Chapuis is a research scientiest at LRI. He is also a member of the InSitu research team.

Wendy Mackay is a research director with INRIA Saclay in France. She is in charge of the research group InSitu.

Summary 

• Hypothesis - The researchers hypothesized that they could improve interaction with wall-sized displays by studying several factors of gesture interactions. They made an individual hypothesis for each factor:
•  Two-handed gestures are more accurate and easier to use.
• Two-handed gestures are faster than one-handed.
•  Users will prefer clutch-free gestures.
• Linear gestures would be best mapped to zoom but should eventually be slower due to aforementioned clutching.
• Gestures utilizing fingers instead of larger muscle groups will be faster.
• One-dimensional path gestures should be faster when using lesser haptic feedback.
• Three-dimensional gestures will be more tiring.
• Method - Their study involved 12 participants. Each participant was asked to use all patterns of interaction. Each participant completed these patterns in a number of sessions, preventing inaccurate data caused by exhaustion and memory loss.
• Results - The results found supported the second hypothesis, as well as the fifth and sixth. The fourth hypothesis was refuted; linear gestures actually ended up being faster than circular gestures. Hypothesis seven was also found to be true. The results for the other hypotheses were inconclusive.
• Content - This paper discusses the best ways a user might interact with a screen too large to interact with directly. They form several hypotheses on how well certain gestures would work, and perform a study based around their hypotheses. They then conducted an experiment to emphasize their key points.

 Discussion

This paper was very interesting. I though their methods may have been a little off, but their results were for the most part expected. I can't say whether or not they thoroughly proved their points, but the paper was well done. Technology like this makes me excited every time I read about it; we keep getting closer to virtual reality rooms and smooth motion gestures for all interactions. I can't wait for the day that I have a display on all of my walls and can change anything I want with a word and a hand gesture.