In addition to our main TIDESS project research questions of understanding how to design more effective learning environments on spherical displays [link], we have also been studying some more specific human-computer interaction research questions regarding interacting with these displays. In Summer and Fall 2018, we conducted a user-defined gesture elicitation study [1], in which we asked children (ages 7-11) and adults to propose touchscreen gestures for different touchscreen tasks on the sphere to help us understand their gesture preferences for touch-enabled spherical displays. Our paper on this study, titled “Do User-Defined Gestures for Flatscreens Generalize to Interactive Spherical Displays for Adults and Children?,” was accepted as a full paper to the International Symposium on Pervasive Displays (PerDis 2019). The paper reports our preliminary findings related to the types of gestures children and adults find intuitive on spherical displays as opposed to flatscreen tabletop displays. Our findings also report on similarities and differences in children’s and adults’ gesture preferences for touch-driven spherical displays.

Here is the abstract:

“Interactive spherical displays offer unique opportunities for engagement in public spaces. Research on flatscreen tabletop displays has mapped the gesture design space and compared gestures created by adults and children. However, it is not clear if the findings from these prior studies can be directly applied to spherical displays. To investigate this question, we conducted a user-defined gestures study to understand the gesture preferences of adults and children (ages 7 to 11) for spherical displays. We compare the physical characteristics of the gestures performed on the spherical display to gestures on tabletop displays from prior work. We found that the spherical form factor influenced users’ gesture design decisions. For example, users were more likely to perform multi-finger or whole-handed gestures on the sphere than in prior work on tabletop displays. Our findings will inform the design of interactive applications for spherical displays.”

Interested readers can find the camera-ready version (preprint) available here. The PerDis 2019 conference will take place in Palermo, Italy from June 12 – June 14. I am really excited since this will be my first time attending PerDis, and my first official conference paper presentation. I am looking forward to presenting our paper at the conference as it will help us get feedback regarding our planned future work on designing for touchscreen spherical displays.

[1] Jacob O. Wobbrock, Meredith Ringel Morris, and Andrew D. Wilson. 2009. User defined Gestures for Surface Computing. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’09), 1083–1092.

by Nikita Soni

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