Research And Design Of Remote Target Selection Technique On Large Displays

With the development of multi-touch technique, large multi-touch screen hasbeen widely used as commercial products. Especially, large displays such as Surfaceand PQ labs have a good potential prospect in libraries and offices. How to effectivelyinteract with large displays has long been of research interest. Unlike interaction witha desktop where all the objects are within users’ reach, users have to walk to operatedistant targets when working at a large display. Selection, one of the mostfundamental operations, is obviously a serious problem people have to face. There isno argument about the necessity of the study of selection techniques on large displays.This paper is focused on interaction techniques with large displays. There aremainly three issues users are dealing with. Firstly, most targets on the large displayare out of users’ reach, users have to walk to select remote targets. Suchinconvenience cause not only physical tiredness but also interruptions to users’workflow. Secondly, the design of traditional techniques showed an inappropriatetendency of complexity, which is obviously unsuitable for such a fundamental task astarget selection. Thirdly, some techniques have their advantage in some scenarios, buttheir gesture recognition algorithms are either complex or inaccurate. Therefore, it isreally needed to design a simple and easy selection technique when working at largedisplays. An improved recognition algorithm is also required.The paper mainly did following works. We reviewed the related work ofselection techniques on large displays, identified the advantages and shortcomings ofthem. Based on all the analysis, we designed and implemented a new technique. Wealso tested it by experiments which included three parts. We first conducted a formalexperiment, analyzed influence of all the conditions on selection time and accuracy. Inthe second part, we invited elder users to test the simplicity of the technique which was compared with traditional techniques. In the third part, we implemented anapplication of the technique on Windows7to test it in practice. In addition, toovercome the shortcomings of conventional gesture recognizers, improve theaccuracy of recognizing and take human computer interaction factors intoconsideration, a new template based recognition algorithm called Grid was alsoproposed.This paper did following contributions. First, it proposed a simple selectiontechnique that overcomes many shortcomings of traditional technique. Theexperiment showed it significantly outperformed traditional technique, and that allparticipants preferred it for its simplicity. An application of the technique wasimplemented which also proved its usability in practice. Second, it designed atemplate based recognition algorithm to avoid the complexity and inaccuracy oftraditional algorithm. Third, based on the analysis of experiment result, we discoveredsome common issues that people meet when design for multi-touch screens and alsoconcluded some code for designers.