Eyes-Free Touch Command Support for Pen-Based Digital Whiteboards via Handheld Devices
Fabrice Matulic, Maria Husmann, Seraiah Walter, Moira C. Norrie · 2015
Digital whiteboards that only sense pen input are limited in their interactive capabilities. One way to artificially add touch support is through personal mobile devices, which people carry with them. This work investigates how smartphones can be used as portable quick-access toolboxes held by the non-dominant hand to provide assistive touch commands for pen-driven whiteboard tasks. We developed two interface designs, one based on a classic remote with standard GUI controls and another optimised for eyes-free operation to eliminate gaze shifts between the two devices. In a controlled evaluation based on an established mode-switching study protocol, we compare the two phone interfaces and a baseline technique consisting of a pen-triggered popup menu on the whiteboard. Our results show a superior efficiency of the phone UIs over the popup. The eyes-free UI only partially performed better than the classic interface at the subtask level after subtracting the costs of errors.