Elbow-Anchored Interaction: Designing Restful Mid-Air Input

Download Publication File

Abstract

We designed a mid-air input space for restful interactions on the couch. We observed people gesturing in various postures on a couch and found that posture affects the choice of arm motions when no constraints are imposed by a system. Study participants that sat with the arm rested were more likely to use the forearm and wrist, as opposed to the whole arm. We investigate how a spherical input space, where forearm angles are mapped to screen coordinates, can facilitate restful mid-air input in multiple postures. We present two controlled studies. In the first, we examine how a spherical space compares with a planar space in an elbow-anchored setup, with a shoulder-level input space as baseline. In the second, we examine the performance of a spherical input space in four common couch postures that set unique constraints to the arm. We observe that a spherical model that captures forearm movement facilitates comfortable input across different seated postures.

Video

Publisher Link

https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445546

Citation

Rafael Veras, Gaganpreet Singh, Farzin Farhadi-Niaki, Ritesh Udhani, Parth Pradeep Patekar, Wei Zhou, Pourang Irani, and Wei Li. 2021. Elbow-Anchored Interaction: Designing Restful Mid-Air Input. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 737, 1–15. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445546

Bibtext Entry

@inproceedings{10.1145/3411764.3445546,
author = {Veras, Rafael and Singh, Gaganpreet and Farhadi-Niaki, Farzin and Udhani, Ritesh and Patekar, Parth Pradeep and Zhou, Wei and Irani, Pourang and Li, Wei},
title = {Elbow-Anchored Interaction: Designing Restful Mid-Air Input},
year = {2021},
isbn = {9781450380966},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445546},
doi = {10.1145/3411764.3445546},
abstract = { We designed a mid-air input space for restful interactions on the couch. We observed people gesturing in various postures on a couch and found that posture affects the choice of arm motions when no constraints are imposed by a system. Study participants that sat with the arm rested were more likely to use the forearm and wrist, as opposed to the whole arm. We investigate how a spherical input space, where forearm angles are mapped to screen coordinates, can facilitate restful mid-air input in multiple postures. We present two controlled studies. In the first, we examine how a spherical space compares with a planar space in an elbow-anchored setup, with a shoulder-level input space as baseline. In the second, we examine the performance of a spherical input space in four common couch postures that set unique constraints to the arm. We observe that a spherical model that captures forearm movement facilitates comfortable input across different seated postures. },
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
articleno = {737},
numpages = {15},
keywords = {Variable-posture Gestures, Elbow-anchored Input, Mid-air Gesture Fatigue, Comfort, Restful Input, Mid-air Gestures},
location = {Yokohama, Japan},
series = {CHI '21}
}