AirPanes: Two-Handed Around-Device Interaction for Pane Switching on Smartphones

Abstract

In recent years, around device input has emerged as a complement to standard touch input, albeit in limited tasks and contexts, such as for item selection or map navigation. We push the boundaries for around device interactions to facilitate an entire smartphone application: browsing through large information lists to make a decision. To this end, we present AirPanes, a novel technique that allows two-handed in-air interactions, conjointly with touch input to perform analytic tasks, such as making a purchase decision. AirPanes resolves the inefficiencies of having to switch between multiple views or panes in common smartphone applications. We explore the design factors that make AirPanes efficient. In a controlled study, we find that AirPanes is on average 50% more efficient that standard touch input for an analytic task. We offer recommendations for implementing AirPanes in a broad range of applications.

Citation

Khalad Hasan, David Ahlström, Junhyeok Kim, and Pourang Irani. 2017. AirPanes: Two-Handed Around-Device Interaction for Pane Switching on Smartphones. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). To appear.