Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble Équipe Ingénierie de l'Interaction Humain-Machine

Équipe Ingénierie de l'Interaction
Humain-Machine

Overcoming Limitations of the Trackpad for 3D Docking Operations

In CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. pages 1239-1244 . 2013.

David Glesser, François Bérard, Jeremy R. Cooperstock

Abstract

From notebook trackpads to mobile phones to tabletop surface computing, multitouch input surfaces have become one of the most dominant interfaces for human-computer interaction. Although these are clearly effective for interaction with 2D graphical user interfaces, we suspect that they are not as well suited for interaction requiring greater degrees of freedom (DoF). Here, we consider the possibility of exploiting two such surfaces, one for each hand, as a means of affording efficient control over higher dimensional tasks. We investigate performance on a 6 DoF task, comparing such a two-surface multitouch input device against the results obtained using a standard 2D mouse, a single multitouch surface, and a 6 DoF free-space device. Our results indicate that two multitouch surfaces significantly improve user performance compared to the mouse and to a single surface.