The Unadorned Desk: Exploiting the Physical Space around a Display as an Input Canvas
Date
2012-09-21T21:27:16Z
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Abstract
In everyday office work, people smoothly use the space on
their physical desks to work with documents of interest, and
to keep associated tools and materials nearby for easy use.
In contrast, the limited screen space of computer displays
imposes interface constraints. Associated material is either
placed off-screen (i.e., temporarily hidden) and requires extra
work to access (window switching, menu selection) or
crowds and competes with the work area (e.g., as palettes
and icons). This problem is worsened by the increasing
popularity of small displays such as tablets and laptops. To
mitigate this problem, we investigate how we can exploit an
unadorned physical desk space as an additional input canvas.
Our Unadorned Desk detects coarse hovering over and
touching of areas on an otherwise standard physical desk,
which is used as input to the desktop computer. Unlike other
augmented desks, feedback is given on the computer’s
screen instead of on the desk itself. To better understand
how people make use of this new input space, we conducted
two user studies: (1) placing and retrieving application
icons onto the desk, and (2) retrieving items from a predefined
grid. We found that participants organize items in a
grid for easier access, and are generally faster without affecting
accuracy without on-screen feedback for few items,
but were more accurate (though slower as they relied on
feedback) for many items
Description
Keywords
Information interfaces and presentation, Interaction Styles