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tPad: Designing Transparent-Display Mobile Interactions

As a novel class of mobile devices with rich interaction capabilities we introduce tPads – transparent display tablets. tPads are the result of a systematic design investigation into the ways and benefits of interacting with transparent mobiles which goes beyond traditional mobile interactions and augmented reality (AR) applications. Through a user-centered design process we explored interaction techniques for transparent-display mobiles and classified them into four categories: overlay, dual display & input, surface capture and model-based interactions. We investigated the technical feasibility of such interactions by designing and building two touch-enabled semi-transparent tablets called tPads and a range of tPad applications. Further, a user study shows that tPad interactions applied to everyday mobile tasks (application switching and image capture) outperform current mobile interactions and were preferred by users. Our hands-on design process and experimental evaluation demonstrate that transparent displays offer novel valuable interaction opportunities for mobile devices.

Hincapié-Ramos, J.D., Roscher, S., Büschel, W., Kister, U., Dachselt, R. and Irani, P. 2014. tPad: Designing Transparent-Display Mobile Interactions. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '14). ACM. Honorable Mention Award.

Authors

Pourang Irani

Pourang Irani

Professor
Canada Research Chair
at University of British Columbia Okanagan Campus

As well as: Sophie Roscher, Wolfgang Büschel, Ulrike Kister, Raimund Dachselt