Wedge: Clutter-Free Visualization of Off-Screen Locations

Abstract

To overcome display limitations of small-screen devices, researchers have proposed techniques that point users to objects located off-screen. Arrow-based techniques such as City Lights convey only direction. Halo conveys direction and distance, but is susceptible to clutter resulting from overlapping halos. We present Wedge, a visualization technique that conveys direction and distance, yet avoids overlap and clutter. Wedge represents each off-screen location using an acute isosceles triangle: the tip coincides with the off-screen locations, and the two corners are located on-screen. A wedge conveys location awareness primarily by means of its two legs pointing towards the target. Wedges avoid overlap programmatically by repelling each other, causing them to rotate until overlap is resolved. As a result, wedges can be applied to numbers and configurations of targets that would lead to clutter if visualized using halos. We report on a user study comparing Wedge and Halo for three off-screen tasks. Participants were significantly more accurate when using Wedge than when using Halo.

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Publisher Link

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357179

Citation

Sean Gustafson, Patrick Baudisch, Carl Gutwin and Pourang Irani. 2008. Wedge: Clutter-Free Visualization of Off-Screen Locations. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '08), 787-796.

Bibtext Entry

@INPROCEEDINGS { gustafson08,
    AUTHOR = { Sean Gustafson and Patrick Baudisch and Carl Gutwin and Pourang Irani },
    TITLE = { Wedge: Clutter-Free Visualization of Off-Screen Locations },
    BOOKTITLE = { Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '08) },
    YEAR = { 2008 },
    PAGES = { 787--796 },
    DOI = { 10.1145/1357054.1357179 },
}