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

Reference Information
Mid-air pan-and-zoom on wall-sized displays by Mathieu Nancel, Julie Wagner, Emmanuel Pietriga, Olivier Chapuis, Wendy Mackay.  Published in the CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems.

Author Bios

• 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 the interim leader of the insitu lab and has a PhD from Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble.
• 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 Saclay in France and has a PhD from MIT.

Summary 

Hypothesis
In this paper, researchers state that wall-sized displays are growing and popularity and yet have no standard for interaction. The researchers propose a series of possible interaction techniques with these displays. The hypothesis is that these mid-air interactions will be more effective than traditional hardware peripherals and will be preferred by users
 
Methods
They conducted an experiment with 12 participants based on three primary factors: handedness, gesture, and guidance.  They controlled for potential distance effects by introducing the Distance between two consecutive targets as a secondary factor. The pan-zoom task involved navigating through two groups of concentric circles, starting at a high zoom level and zooming out until the neighboring group is visible.  Then they pan and zoom until they reach the target group.
 
ResultsThe 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.
 
ContentsThe paper discusses how users might best interact with a large screen by studying several different motions and commands.  They wanted to observe ease of use, causes of fatigue, and how simple or complex the interactions might be.  They proposed several ideas at the beginning to guide their research, and then performed an experiment to highlight the key points.  They found that while most of their hypotheses were supported, they had judged one or two points inaccurately.
 
Discussion
I think the researchers achieve the goal of developing effective mid-air interaction techniques for wall sized displays. It's very interesting that the hardware based input methods were found to be preferable in many instances