tPad: Designing Transparent-Display Mobile Interactions

Abstract

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.

Video

Citation

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.