Traces of Time through Space

Technology have long been a partner of workplace meeting facilitation. The recent outbreak of COVID-19 and the cautionary measures to reduce its spread have made it more prevalent than ever before in the form of online-meetings. In this paper, we recount our experiences during weekly meetings in three modalities: using SAGE2 - a collaborative sharing software designed for large displays - for co-located meetings, using a conventional projector for co-located meetings, and using the Zoom video-conferencing tool for distributed meetings. We view these meetings through the lens of effective meeting attributes and share ethnographic observations and attitudinal survey conducted in our research lab. We discuss patterns of content sharing, either sequential, parallel, or semi-parallel, and the potential advantages of creating complex canvases of content. We see how the SAGE2 tool affords parallel content sharing to create complex canvases, which represent queues of ideas and contributions (past, present, and future) using the space on a large display to suggest the progression of time through the meeting.

Child–display interaction: Lessons learned on touchless avatar-based large display interfaces

During the last decade, touchless gestural interfaces have been widely studied as one of the most promising interaction paradigms in the context of pervasive displays. In particular, avatars and silhouettes have proved to be effective in making the touchless capacity of displays self-evident. In this paper, we focus on a child–display interaction approach to avatar-based touchless gestural interfaces. We believe that large displays offer an opportunity to stimulate children’s experiences and engagement; for instance, learning about art is very engaging for children but can bring a number of challenges. Our study aims to contribute to the literature on both pervasive displays and child–computer interaction by reporting the results of a study involving 107 children aged 2 to 10 years. The main purposes of this study were to discover: (1) whether an avatar (movable or immovable) provides interactions that are intuitive for children and therefore help to overcome so-called “affordance blindness”; (2) whether an avatar-based touchless interface makes children’s experiences engaging and enjoyable therefore improving recall of content provided through the interaction (learning about art). The study unveiled relevant outcomes in terms of affordance blindness and two-handed interactions. We provide evidence indicating that chronological age influences the style of child–avatar interaction. Finally, it is suggested that avatars could facilitate the development of new effective educational technologies for young children.

Experimental Evaluation on the Effect of Electrode Configuration in Electrostatic Actuators for Increasing Vibrotactile Feedback Intensity

Vibrotactile feedback is a key feature of many modern touch displays, which greatly enhances user experiences when interacting with an onscreen interface. Despite its popularity in small touch screen devices, this haptic feature is absent in most large displays due to a lack of suitable actuators for such applications. Thus, a growing need exists for haptic actuators capable of producing sufficient vibrations in large touch displays. This study proposes and evaluates a novel electrostatic resonant actuator (ERA) with a moving mass and dual electrodes for increased vibration feedback intensity. The dual-electrode ERA was fabricated along with a comparable single-electrode ERA to investigate the effect of the electrode configuration on the maximum vibration intensity. When measured directly on the mass, the maximum vibration intensity of the dual-electrode actuator increased by 73% compared to the single-electrode actuator. When mounted and measured on a mock panel, the maximum vibration intensity of the dual-electrode actuator increased by nearly 65% compared to a similarly mounted single-electrode actuator. These results show that the dual-electrode configuration can significantly increase the vibration intensity when compared to the conventional ERA. This demonstrates a promising potential for the use of the proposed actuator for generating vibrotactile feedback in large touch displays.

The Semantic Meaning of Hand Shapes and Z-Dimension Movements of Freehand Distal Pointing on Large Displays

It is difficult to select small targets in freehand distal pointing on large displays due to physical fatigue and jitter. Previous research proposed many solutions but not through the semantic meaning of hand behaviors. The purpose of this study is to investigate the hand behaviors, including hand shapes and motions in the Z-dimension between small and large target selections, by means of two controlled experiments. The generated results indicated that the following: (1) when interacting with a large display from a remote distance, users preferred to complete a low-precision task by the whole hand while using the finger in high-precision tasks. As a result, users moved small targets by the index finger gesture while moving large targets by open hand gesture; (2) selection of small targets led to hand stretching which might reduce the interaction distance; (3) the orientation had significant effects on hand motions in the Z-dimension. The relationship between orientation and hand motions in the Z-dimension is similar to a sinusoidal function; (4) mouse-like pointing had much impact on freehand interaction. Based on these results, some design guidelines for freehand interaction and design suggestions for freehand pointing were discussed.