Orientation on tabletop displays
Grant Mitchell · Summit (Simon Fraser University) · 2003
Tabletop computer displays suffer from an orientat,ion problem.Solutions based on competing approaches have been impleniented, but there remain ~manswercd quest,ioris about the ideal solution.Within a context of interacting with docurnents on t,abletop displays, requireilleiits for orientation control were found by examiili~ig literat,ure on how people use paper docunierits arid what manipdatioils t,hey perform.It was determined that corltrol must provide quick, either-handed, low-attention manipulation of individual objects or1 the display.A11 evaluation of existing intcraction tedmiques for rotatlion was performed in light of these criteria.The trade-off between t,wo desirable charact.cristics,integral translatio~i and rotation, arid direct input,, was exaininecl.An evaluation of mouse-based techniques corlfirnled that iritegral input has the potential to be faster than the established sequential-manipulation techniques due to the t,inie saved by overlapping manipulation of different degrees of fite- donl.For a single task conibinilig t,ranslation and rotation the separable technique took twice as long compared to two separate tasks of the same translation or rotation, whereas the integral techniques took less time for the combined action than the two separat,e actions.However, the integral mouse-based techniques were too slow in their actual manipulatioii, with the scroll wheel taking four t,inles as long to rot,at,e than the separable technique, and the new drag technique not being used in an integral manner.It was concluded that tlie current generally available technology such as the mouse and sii1glepoint touch-sensitive overlays are inadequate.Acceptable t,abletop orientation corit,rol will be dependent on t,lle maturation of newer t~echriologies based on tangible interfaces or possibly multi-finger input.Until then, interaction techniques for manipulating documents on tabletop displays should be chosen according to tlieir ability to concurrently control position and orientation, such as t,hree degree-of-freedom input devices on digitizing tablets.t,lGng aft,cr making it all the way tlrrougll.Making it all the way t,houglr is exactly what this acknowledgancrit is about.The most important person, without q~est~ion, is Brenda, my wife and best friend.I may be the one who gets a few 1et.ters to add aRer my name (at least, when I'm trying to impress somcone), but she suffered t,hrougli it with me every step of the way.Helping provide sticktoitiveness were my parents David & Daphne, wit,hout whom I would never have kept aiming for the goal.Many friends at school lielped made the walk enjoyable.Too many to name everyone, cspccially tlre many friends from the computer science grad 1111rcl~oom / ping pong room.