Visual separation in mobile multi-display environments

ABSTRACT

Projector phones, handheld game consoles and many other mobile devices increasingly include more than one display, and therefore present a new breed of mobile Multi-Display Environments (MDEs) to users. Existing studies illustrate the effects of visual separation between displays in MDEs and suggest interaction techniques that mitigate these effects. Currently, mobile devices with heterogeneous displays such as projector phones are often designed without reference to visual separation issues; therefore it is critical to establish whether concerns and opportunities raised in the existing MDE literature apply to the emerging category of Mobile MDEs (MMDEs). This paper investigates the effects of visual separation in the context of MMDEs and contrasts these with fixed MDE results, and explores design factors for Mobile MDEs. Our study uses a novel eye-tracking methodology for measuring switches in visual context between displays and identifies that MMDEs offer increased design flexibility over traditional MDEs in terms of visual separation. We discuss these results and identify several design implications.

References

1. Ankrum, D. R. Visual Ergonomics in the Office - Guidelines. Technical Report, 1999.
2. Baudisch, P., Cutrell, E., Hinckley, K. and Gruen, R. Mouse ether: accelerating the acquisition of targets across multi-monitor displays. In CHI '04 EA, ACM, 2004, pp. 1379--1382.
3. Benko, H. and Feiner, S. Multi-monitor mouse. In CHI '05 EA, ACM, 2005, pp. 1208--1211.
4. Benko, H. and Feiner, S. Pointer warping in heterogeneous multi-monitor environments. In Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2007, ACM, 2007, pp. 111--117.
5. Bi, X., Bae, S.-H. and Balakrishnan, R. Effects of interior bezels of tiled-monitor large displays on visual search, tunnel steering, and target selection. In CHI 2010, ACM, 2010, pp. 65--74.
6. Cao, X., Forlines, C. and Balakrishnan, R. Multi-user interaction using handheld projectors. In UIST 2007, ACM, 2007, pp. 43--52.
7. Cauchard, J. R., Fraser, M. and Subramanian, S. Offsetting Displays on Mobile Projector Phones. In Ubiprojection Workshop on Personal Projection at Pervasive 2010, pp. 3.
8. Chen, C.-H. and Chien, Y.-H. Effects of RSVP display design on visual performance in accomplishing dual tasks with small screens. International Journal of Design, 1, 2007, pp. 27--35.
9. Chen, N., Guimbretiere, F., Dixon, M., Lewis, C. and Agrawala, M. Navigation techniques for dual-display e-book readers. In CHI'08, ACM, pp. 1779--1788.
10. Cowan, L. and Li, K. ShadowPuppets: Supporting Collocated Interaction with Mobile Projector Phones Using Hand Shadows. In CHI 2011, AC.
11. Dickie, C., Hart, J., Vertegaal, R. and Eiser, A. LookPoint: an evaluation of eye input for hands-free switching of input devices between multiple computers. In OZCHI '06, ACM, 2006, pp. 119--126.
12. Dickson, F. Pico Projectors: One Reason Bigger Isn't Better. Technical Report IN1004722WH, In-Stat, 2010.
13. Forlines, C., Shen, C., Wigdor, D. and Balakrishnan, R. Exploring the effects of group size and display configuration on visual search. In CSCW '06, ACM, 2006, pp. 11--20.
14. Greenberg, S., Boyle, M. and Laberge, J. PDAs and shared public displays: Making personal information public, and public information personal. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 3, 1999, pp. 54--64.
15. Grudin, J. Partitioning digital worlds: focal and peripheral awareness in multiple monitor use. In CHI 2001, ACM, 2001, pp. 458--465.
16. Hang, A., Rukzio, E. and Greaves, A. Projector phone: a study of using mobile phones with integrated projector for interaction with maps. In MobileHCI 2008, ACM, 2008, pp. 207--216.
17. Hinckley, K., Dixon, M., Sarin, R., Guimbretiere, F. and Balakrishnan, R. Codex: a dual screen tablet computer. In CHI'09, ACM, 2009, pp. 1933--1942.
18. Hinckley, K., Ramos, G., Guimbretiere, F., Baudisch, P. and Smith, M. Stitching: pen gestures that span multiple displays. In AVI 2004, ACM, pp. 23--31.
19. Kern, D., Marshall, P. and Schmidt, A. Gazemarks: gaze-based visual placeholders to ease attention switching. In CHI 2010, ACM, 2010, pp. 2093--2102.
20. Kirsh, D. and Maglio, P. On Distinguishing Epistemic from Pragmatic Action. Cognitive Science, 18, 1994, pp. 513--549.
21. Lyons, K., Pering, T., Rosario, B., Sud, S. and Want, R. Multi-display Composition: Supporting Display Sharing for Collocated Mobile Devices. In Proceedings of the 12th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Part I, Springer-Verlag, 2009, pp. 758--771.
22. Mandryk, R. L., Rodgers, M. E. and Inkpen, K. M. Sticky widgets: pseudo-haptic widget enhancements for multi-monitor displays. In CHI '05 EA, ACM, 2005, pp. 1621--1624.
23. Matsumoto, T., Horiguchi, D., Nakashima, S. and Okude, N. Z-agon: mobile multi-display browser cube. In CHI '06 EA, ACM, 2006, pp. 351--356.
24. Merrill, D., Kalanithi, J. and Maes, P. Siftables: towards sensor network user interfaces. In TEI'07 ACM, 2007, pp. 75--78.
25. Nacenta, M. A., Sallam, S., Champoux, B., Subramanian, S. and Gutwin, C. Perspective cursor: perspective-based interaction for multi-display environments. In CHI'06, ACM, 2006, pp. 289--298.
26. Ota, S., Takegawa, Y., Terada, T. and Tsukamoto, M. A Method for Wearable Projector Selection that Considers the Viewability of Projected Images. Comput. Entertain. 8, 2010, pp. 1--16.
27. Pinhanez, C., Kjeldsen, R., Levas, A., Pingali, G., Podlaseck, M. and Sukaviriya, N. Applications of steerable projector-camera systems. In IEEE International Workshop on Projector-Camera Systems at ICCV 2003, IEEE Computer Society Press.
28. Su, R. and Bailey, B. P. Put Them Where? Towards Guidelines for Positioning Large Displays. In Proc. of Graphics Interface '05, 2005, pp. 337--349.
29. Tan, D. S. and Czerwinski, M. Effects of Visual Separation and Physical Discontinuities when Distributing Information across Multiple Displays. In Interact 2003, pp. 252--255.
30. Yang, X.-D., Mak, E., McCallum, D., Irani, P., Cao, X. and Izadi, S. LensMouse: augmenting the mouse with an interactive touch display. In CHI 2010, ACM, 2010, pp. 2431--2440..

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • Interaction paradigms

      • Graphical user interfaces