Reading #22: Mid-air Pan-and-Zoom on Wall-sized Displays

References
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 a PhD student at Université Paris-Sud XI.
Julie Wagner is a student at the insitu lab in Paris.
Emmanuel Pietriga is a researcher for INRIA.
Olivier Chapuis is a researcher at LRI.
Wendy Mackay is a research director at INRIA.


Summary:
Hypothesis:
That, one large touch displays, two handed gestures would be faster than one handed gestures, smaller gestures would be preferred over larger, fingers would provide more accuracy than a whole hand, and that circular motions would be preferred.


Methods:
The authors simply built a large touch display and tested different gestures on it. The panning and zooming test required users to move through several sets of rings while zooming in and out and panning. Different things such as target distance were varied through the experiment.


Results:
The found that two hands were in fact faster than one, although users seemed to prefer one handed gestures. Linear and 1 dimensional path control were faster than their counters, 2D and circular, which were said to be hard to use by users.


Contents:
The paper recorded the results of studying subjects using different forms of touch input to use a large touch display. The results were recorded based on performance time as well as user input.


Discussion:
I really like touch displays so i thought this paper was really neat. I hope to one day have a wall sized touch display in my home so i feel like this research is pretty relevant. Honestly though i was surprised by how different it is to interact with such a large scale touch display, rather than say your cell phone or tablet. There are a ton of new challenges that i would not have thought of and i found that really fascinating.