2M

Abstract

In the physical world, most human activities involve the use of two hands. As part of ubiquitous computing that aims at combining the physical and the digital worlds, understanding how to design two-handed interaction is therefore important. This article presents a new design space for two-handed interaction, called 2M. The 2M design space takes its foundations in two complementary research domains: multimodal interaction and two-handed interaction. On the one hand we enrich the multimodal design space to take into account the roles of the two hands. On the other hand, we extend the two-handed interaction design space to cover the temporal as well as fusion aspects of multimodal interaction. This article presents the resulting 2M design space and demonstrates its descriptive power. We finally study the generative capacity of 2M for designing new forms of two-handed interaction in the context of the NavGraphe project that focuses on the interactive manipulation of very large biological structures (e.g., RNA structures).