Paper Reading #22- Mid-air pan-and-zoom on wall-sized displays

Title: Mid-air pan-and-zoom on wall-sized displays
Reference Information:
Mathieu Nancel, Julie Wagner, Emmanuel Pietriga, Olivier Chapuis, and Wendy Mackay. "Mid-air pan-and-zoom on wall-sized displays". CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM New York, NY, USA. ©2011. ISBN: 978-1-4503-0228-9.
Author Bios:
Mathieu Nancel- I am a Ph.D. student in Human-Computer Interactions in the in | situ | team (INRIA/LRI) since september 2008. I work on distal interaction techniques for visualization platforms: precise pointing, navigation in very large datasets, menu techniques, etc.
My Ph.D. supervisors are Michel Beaudouin-Lafon and Emmanuel Pietriga.
Julie Wagner- She is a Ph.D Student at INRIA. Her supervisor is Wendy Mackay.
Emmanuel Pietriga- Chargé de Recherche - CR1, interim leader of INRIA team In Situ.
Full-time research scientist working for INRIA Saclay - Île-de-France.

Olivier Chapuis- Chargé de recherche (Research Scientist) CNRS at LRI (CNRS & Univ. Paris-Sud).
Member and team co-head (by interim) of the InSitu research team (LRI & INRIA Saclay Ile-de-France).
Wendy Mackay- She is currently a Research Director with INRIA Saclay in France, currently on sabbatical at Stanford University. She runs a research group called in|situ|. Their focus is on the design of innovative interactive systems that truly meet the needs of their users.

Summary:

• Hypothesis: If the authors can study and trial different methods for large-scale wall-display-sized navigation, then they will create an optimal gesture set suitable for real and complex applications dealing with such a problem space. The authors had 7 separate hypotheses about each particular area of their design, but I combined this to make one general hypothesis.
• Methods: The authors conducted a series of pilot tests, pursued research, and performed empirical studies to narrow down all possible gesture and input methods for this system down to 12. They took into account performance (cost and accuracy), fatigue over periods of use of the input, ease of use, and natural mapping. The authors conducted an experiment to evaluate each of the 12 factors they discussed using in their system to see which were optimal. The authors had their ideas about which of the 12 were optimal to begin with, but they tested their ideas to see if this was the case.
• Results: After the experiment, the authors found that the two-handed gesture tasks were performed faster than the one-handed gesture tasks, involving smaller muscle groups for input interactions improves performance (providing higher guidance further improves it), and linearly-performed tasks were generally performed faster than circular ones. Circular gestures were slower because it was more often that participants overshot their target with circular gestures than with linear ones. After receiving feedback from the participants, they found that what the users were saying were (in general) in agreeance with their results from the data gathered.
• Content: The authors wanted to study a field that has historically received little attention. They wanted to figure out a way to effectively explore a wall-sized interaction surface with respect to performance, ease, and minimal fatigue. The authors eventually found (via studies and pilot testing) an optimal set of interactions and gestures suitable for such an interaction space.

Discussion:
I thought this paper was pretty interesting. This field of study has a lot of real-world applications such as (as mentioned in the paper) crisis management/response, large-scale construction, and security management areas. I thought their studies were accurate, appropriate, and extensive enough to gather relevant and meaningful data for designing a suitable system for the display. They definitely achieved their goals, in my opinion. I would have loved to have been a participant in this particular experiment; I think it would have been fun. I would consider using a technology like this if I was a billionaire and wanted to play a video game on my wall where I was a controller or something.