Abstract

The use of human fingers as an object selection and manipulation tool has raised significant challenges when interacting with direct-touch tabletop displays. This is particularly an issue when manipulating remote objects in 3D environments as finger presses can obscure objects at a distance that are rendered very small. Techniques to support remote manipulation either provide absolute mappings between finger presses and object transformation or rely on tools that support relative mappings to selected objects. This paper explores techniques to manipulate remote 3D objects on direct-touch tabletops using absolute and relative mapping modes. A user study was conducted to compare absolute and relative mappings in support of a rotation task. Overall results did not show a statistically significant difference between these two mapping modes on both task completion time and the number of touches. However, the absolute mapping mode was found to be less efficient than the relative mapping mode when rotating a small object. Also participants preferred relative mapping for small objects. Four mapping techniques were then compared for perceived ease of use and learnability. Touchpad, voodoo doll and telescope techniques were found to be comparable for manipulating remote objects in a 3D scene. A flying camera technique was considered too complex and required increased effort by participants. Participants preferred an absolute mapping technique augmented to support small object manipulation, e.g. the voodoo doll technique.

Highlights

  • Direct-touch interfac es that t ake human fingers as the input device have a strong appeal to users as they provide an intuitive and compelling interaction experience without using any intermediary devices (Benko et al, 2006)

  • This paper explores three techniques that are suitable for enlarging remote objects on directtouch tabletops avoiding the issues defined above, namely the voodoo doll, telescope and flying camera techniques

  • This paper has described two experiments to explore techniques to manipulate remot e 3D objects on direct-touch tabletops

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Summary

Introduction

Direct-touch interfac es that t ake human fingers as the input device have a strong appeal to users as they provide an intuitive and compelling interaction experience without using any intermediary devices (Benko et al, 2006). The size of an adult’s finger may occlude small objects on a tablet op making them difficult to manipulate (Albinsson and Zhai, 2003; Shen et al, 2006). Compared to mouse cursor use, the human finger is a pointing device with ve ry low resolution (Albinsson and Zhai, 2003; Ryall et al, 2006). It can be difficult to use the human finger for precise pointing at a target area on a small object. Applications that work well with mouse as the input device may not be applicable when running on direct-touch tablet ops

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