Our paper on analysis of users’ gestural interaction mental models for multi-touch spherical displays, titled as “Adults’ and Children’s Mental Models for Gestural Interactions with Interactive Spherical Displays,” was accepted to ACM SIGCHI 2020, a top conference for human-computer interaction! We previously reported in our PerDis’19 paper [1] a comparision of patterns in the physical characteristics (e.g., hand pose, number of fingers) of children’s and adults’ gestures on interactive spherical displays to those on flatscreen displays. In this CHI’20 paper, we analyzed think-aloud data from the same gesture elicitation study [1] to understand what differences may exist in children’s and adults’ gestural interaction mental models for spherical and flatscreen tabletop displays. During the gesture elicitation study, which we conducted in Summer and Fall 2018, we asked children (ages 7-11) and adults to suggest touchscreen gestures for different tasks on a multi-touch spherical display. To help us understand the underlying mental models that drive users’ interactions with spherical displays, during the study we also asked users to think-aloud while suggesting touchscreen gestures. The CHI’20 paper reports our new understanding of users’ mental models for interacting with spherical displays.

Here is the abstract:

“Interactive spherical displays offer numerous opportunities for engagement and education in public settings. Prior work established that users’ touch-gesture patterns on spherical displays differ from those on flatscreen tabletops, and speculated that these differences stem from dissimilarity in how users conceptualize interactions with these two form factors. We analyzed think-aloud data collected during a gesture elicitation study to understand adults’ and children’s (ages 7 to 11) conceptual models of interaction with spherical displays and compared them to conceptual models of interaction with tabletop displays from prior work. Our findings confirm that the form factor strongly influenced users’ mental models of interaction with the sphere. For example, participants conceptualized that the spherical display would respond to gestures in a similar way as real-world spherical objects like physical globes. Our work contributes new understanding of how users draw upon the perceived affordances of the sphere as well as prior touchscreen experience during their interactions.”

Interested readers can find the camera-ready version (preprint) available here. The CHI 2020 conference will take place in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi from April 25 – April 30. I am really excited since this is my first first-author paper at CHI. I am looking forward to presenting our paper at the conference as presenting our work will help us gain valuable feedback from the CHI community related to our current and the planned work on designing interactions for multi-touch spherical displays.

[1] Soni, N., Gleaves, S., Neff, H., Morrison-Smith, S., Esmaeili, S., Mayne, I., Bapat, S., Schuman, C., Stofer, K.A., and Anthony, L. 2019. Do User-Defined Gestures for Flatscreens Generalize to Interactive Spherical Displays for Adults and Children? Proceedings of the International Symposium on Pervasive Displays (PerDis’ 2019), Palermo, Italy, June 12-14, Article No. 24, 7 Pages.

by Nikita Soni

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