Paper Reading #22: Mid-air pan-and-zoom on wall-sized displays

Authors

Mathieu Nancel, Julie Wagner, Emmanuel Pietriga, Olivier Chapuis, Wendy Mackay

Occupation

Mathieu Nancel is currently a PhD student in HCI in the Université Paris-Sud XI under the supervision of Michel Beaudouin-Lafon and Emmanuel Pietriga.

Julie Wagner is a PhD student in the insitu lab in Paris, working on new tangible interfaces and new interaction paradigms at large public displays.

Emmanuel Pietriga is currently a full-time research scientist working for INRIA Saclay - Île-de-France.  He is also the interim leader of INRIA team In Situ.

Olivier Chapuis is a Research Scientist at LRI.  He is also a member of and team co-head of the InSitu research team.  

Wendy Mackay is a research director with INRIA in France but currently at Stanford University 

Location

Published in the CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems at NYC

Summary

Hypothesis

Main point of the paper is to show that there is more research necessary on complex tasks when dealing with wall sized displays. The author mentioned several predictions in terms of human interaction with wall sized displays: two hands is faster than one, two hand should be more accurate and easier to use, linear gestures should map better, users will prefer clutch free circular gesture, finger techniques should be faster than other gesture requiring larger muscle groups, path gesture should be faster with lesser haptic feedback, 3D gesture will be more tiring

Methods

twelve participants were based and the experiment focused on three factors: handedness, gesture, and guidance. potential distance effects were controlled by using the distance between two targets as a secondary factor. examples of tasks included pan zoom task which was done by navigating two groups of concentric circles starting from high level zoom and zooming out until other groups were visible.

Results

The data collected from the participants supported several of the small predictions made by the authors. These include finger techniques being faster, path gestures should be faster, 3D gesture being more tiring. There were some results that went against their original thought such as linear gestures map better than circular.

Content

The paper focuses on how users can interact with large screen by looking into gestures and motions. They were concerned with various ways that can facilitate communication without too much trouble, fatigue, and complexity. There were several thoughts thrown in by the authors in terms of how the participants would react. Although most of their guesses came out as expected there were few points that were to the contrary.

Discussion

I thought it was a interesting paper with a interesting field of study. I think that this kind of research can have some good application in the near future since it is very possible to initiate this with the current technology with ease. The paper itself is also very through and easy to grasp based on how it is organized.