Title:
Imaginary Interfaces: Spatial Interaction with Empty Hands and without Visual Feedback
Reference Information:
Patrick Baudisch, Daniel Bierwirth, and Sean Gustafson. "Imaginary Interfaces: Spatial Interaction with Empty Hands and without Visual Feedback". UIST '10 Proceeding of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology. ACM New York, NY, USA ©2010. ISBN: 978-1-4503-0271-5.
Author Bios:
Mr. Sean Gustafson is currently a PhD student at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. He is supervised by Dr. Baudisch. He holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science from the University of Manitoba.
Mr. Daniel Bierwirth receievd his Master's degree in IT-systems engineering from the Hasso Plattner Institute on Potsdam, Germany. He receieved his undergraduate degree in Computer Science from the Bauhaus Institute in Germany. He is the co-founder of Matt Hatting and Company UG and the Agentur Richard GbR.
Dr. Patrick Baudisch has had publications affiliated with GMD- the German National Research Center for Information Technology, GMD- First, PARC (a Xerox company), and Microsoft. He is a professor and the Chair of the Human Computer Interaction Lab at the Hasso Plattner Institute on Potsdam, Germany. He received his PhD. in Computer Science from Darmstadt University of Technology in Darmstadt, Germany.
Summary:
- Hypothesis: Spatial interaction does not require a screen for interaction and users may interact (with a high degree of efficiency and usability) with interfaces that solely exist in their imagination.
- Methods: These authors recruited sets of twelve volunteers (five women) for each problem they faced. Some of the problems they faced included being able to construct objects in space using Imaginary Interfaces, being able to manipulate those objects with the device, being able to access particular points on drawn objects using the device, and being able to construct more complex objects in the space also using the device. For the first problem associated with being able to consrtuct simple shapes in a user-defined space, the authors had the volunteers begin by forming an "L" with their non-dominant hand to form a "frame space" while drawing with their dominant hand in the "frame" they created. For the problem associated with being able to manipulate drawn objects in the space, the authors had the volunteers draw a curved graph and asked them to circle the highest and lowest points on the graph. For the problem associated with being able to access particular points on objects or in space, the authors had the volunteers "point" to a particular "coordinate" in their place by "tapping" an area in their defined coordinate plane where they think it would be located. For instance, while holding your non-dominant hand in the shape of an "L" to form the origin for the coordinate plane (an "X-Y" plane), if you were asked to point to an area where (2,1) might be located, could you do it? And finally, the last problem associated with drawing more complex shapes is self-explanitory.
- Results: The authors found that the first test with drawing simple shapes turned out to be very successful and that users' short-term memory served well. Most of the letters were connected and some appeared as if the volunteers were actually writing on paper. For the second problem, the authors also found a decent success rate. However, when the authors performed a second trial on this subject by asking the volunteers to turn 90 degrees and perform the same actions, the authors were disappointed by the results (but did in turn find one factor that decreases visuospatial memory aka short-term visual constructive memory). For the third problem associated with accessing individual points on a user-defined "coordinate plane", the results were somewhat interesting to the authors- the closer to the non-dominant, coordinate-defining hand the users were locating points, the more accurate they were; the farther they moved from these locations, the more inaccurate they became. The final problem associated with drawing complex shapes produced expected results to the authors- the more lines or verteces that were associated with the shape, the more inaccurate and "worse" the drawings appeared (showing that the user's visuospatial memory was fading).
- Contents: In this paper, three men (the authors) sought to show off their created work called Imaginary Interfaces. They tested it out in practical situations with typical users other than themselves by recruiting random volunteers to come in and be a part of their experiement to measure the success of their creation. After each experiment was conducted, results were gathered. The whole point of this creation was to build on spatial interaction ideas as well as to miniturize technology as much as possible without the use of a screen whatsoever.
Discussion:
I thought this paper was very interesting actually. I had no idea that these things were possible to do, and I really admire people of this calibur that can create technologies such as this. It blows my mind to keep reading up on creations like this because it always leads me to think, "Where do we go from here?". The authors did achieve their goals successfully because the results from each experiment were positive enough that a little tweaking could really launch this product into major implementation and distribution. I am very convinced by their results. For example, in the first experiment having users draw letters the error rate was around 6%. Also, most of their work is based on user's
visuospatial memory. For people like me with a photographic memory, these kinds of technologies wouldn't be so hard to use because I have the capability to memorize very well a canvas and what I have drawn for a good couple of minutes. Their results back up my opinions about people's general
visuospatial memory as well. However, some factors, such as movement of the body or reconstruction of a "frame space" can lead to inaccurate results while using the
Imaginary Interface. These are the lone faults of the product so far. One thing that was interesting to me was that the authors mentioned a way for a computer to be able to receive data from the
Imaginary Interface in real-time. They also mentioned a way to be able to call someone like on a phone. They never explained how to do these things but just the fact that (allegedly) these capabilities are there make this product really interesting to me.
