Mathieu Nancel

Mid-air pan-and-zoom on wall-sized displays

Very-high-resolution wall-sized displays offer new opportunities for interacting with large data sets. While pointing on this type of display has been studied extensively, higher-level, more complex tasks such as pan-zoom navigation have received little attention. It thus remains unclear which techniques are best suited to perform multiscale navigation in these environments. Building upon empirical data gathered from studies of pan-and-zoom on desktop computers and studies of remote pointing, we identified three key factors for the design of mid-air pan-and-zoom techniques: uni- vs. bimanual interaction, linear vs. circular movements, and level of guidance to accomplish the gestures in mid-air. After an extensive phase of iterative design and pilot testing, we ran a controlled experiment aimed at better understanding the influence of these factors on task performance. Significant effects were obtained for all three factors: bimanual interaction, linear gestures and a high level of guidance resulted in significantly improved performance. Moreover, the interaction effects among some of the dimensions suggest possible combinations for more complex, real-world tasks.

High-precision pointing on large wall displays using small handheld devices

Rich interaction with high-resolution wall displays is not limited to remotely pointing at targets. Other relevant types of interaction include virtual navigation, text entry, and direct manipulation of control widgets. However, most techniques for remotely acquiring targets with high precision have studied remote pointing in isolation, focusing on pointing efficiency and ignoring the need to support these other types of interaction. We investigate high-precision pointing techniques capable of acquiring targets as small as 4 millimeters on a 5.5 meters wide display while leaving up to 93 % of a typical tablet devices screen space available for task-specific widgets. We compare these techniques to state-of-the-art distant pointing techniques and show that two of our techniques, a purely relative one and one that uses head orientation, perform as well or better than the best pointing-only input techniques while using a fraction of the interaction resources.

Multisurface Interaction in the WILD Room

The WILD (wall-sized interaction with large datasets) room serves as a testbed for exploring the next generation of interactive systems by distributing interaction across diverse computing devices, enabling multiple users to easily and seamlessly create, share, and manipulate digital content. The featured Web extra is a video of Michel Beaudouin-Lafon and his colleagues demonstrating how the WILD (wall-sized interaction with large datasets) room lets users view, explore, manipulate large amounts of digital content.

Myopoint: Pointing and Clicking Using Forearm Mounted Electromyography and Inertial Motion Sensors

We describe a mid-air, barehand pointing and clicking interaction technique using electromyographic (EMG) and inertial measurement unit (IMU) input from a consumer armband device. The technique uses enhanced pointer feedback to convey state, a custom pointer acceleration function tuned for angular inertial motion, and correction and filtering techniques to minimize side-effects when combining EMG and IMU input. By replicating a previous large display study using a motion capture pointing technique, we show the EMG and IMU technique is only 430 to 790 ms slower and has acceptable error rates for targets greater than 48 mm. Our work demonstrates that consumer-level EMG and IMU sensing is practical for distant pointing and clicking on large displays.

Mid-Air Pointing on Ultra-Walls

Ultra-high resolution wall-sized displays (“ultra-walls”) are effective for presenting large datasets, but their size and resolution make traditional pointing techniques inadequate for precision pointing. We study mid-air pointing techniques that can be combined with other, domain-specific interactions. We first explore the limits of existing single-mode remote pointing techniques and demonstrate theoretically that they do not support high-precision pointing on ultra-walls. We then explore solutions to improve mid-air pointing efficiency: a tunable acceleration function and a framework for dual-precision (DP) techniques, both with precise tuning guidelines. We designed novel pointing techniques following these guidelines, several of which outperform existing techniques in controlled experiments that involve pointing difficulties never tested prior to this work. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of our techniques to help interaction designers choose the best technique according to the task and equipment at hand. Finally, we discuss the cognitive mechanisms that affect pointing performance with these techniques.

Clutching Is Not (Necessarily) the Enemy

Clutching is usually assumed to be triggered by a lack of physical space and detrimental to pointing performance. We conduct a controlled experiment using a laptop trackpad where the effect of clutching on pointing performance is dissociated from the effects of control-to-display transfer functions. Participants performed a series of target acquisition tasks using typical cursor acceleration functions with and without clutching. All pointing tasks were feasible without clutching, but clutch-less movements were harder to perform, caused more errors, required more preparation time, and were not faster than clutch-enabled movements.

Modeling User Performance on Curved Constrained Paths

In 1997, Accot and Zhai presented seminal work analyzing the temporal cost and instantaneous speed profiles associated with movement along constrained paths. Their work posited and validated the emph{steering law}, which described the relationship between path constraint, path length and the temporal cost of path traversal using a computer input device (e.g. a mouse). In this paper, we argue that the steering law fails to correctly model constrained paths of varying, arbitrary curvature, propose a new form of the law that accommodates these curved paths, and empirically validate our model.

Un espace de conception fondé sur une analyse morphologique des techniques de menus

This paper presents a design space based on a morphological analysis of menu techniques. The goal of this design space is to facilitate the exploration of novel menu designs, in particular to increase menu capacity without sacrificing performance. The paper demonstrates the generative aspect of this design space with four new menu designs based on poorly explored combinations of input dimensions. For two of these four designs, the paper presents controlled experiments that show that they perform on a par with other menus from the literature.

Introducing Transient Gestures to Improve Pan and Zoom on Touch Surfaces

Despite the ubiquity of touch-based input and the availability of increasingly computationally powerful touchscreen devices, there has been comparatively little work on enhancing basic canonical gestures such as swipe-to-pan and pinch-to-zoom. In this paper, we introduce transient pan and zoom, i.e. pan and zoom manipulation gestures that temporarily alter the view and can be rapidly undone. Leveraging typical touchscreen support for additional contact points, we design our transient gestures such that they co-exist with traditional pan and zoom interaction. We show that our transient pan-and-zoom reduces repetition in multi-level navigation and facilitates rapid movement between document states. We conclude with a discussion of user feedback, and directions for future research.

Pointing at a Distance with Everyday Smart Devices

Large displays are becoming commonplace at work, at home, or in public areas. However, interaction at a distance -- anything greater than arms-length -- remains cumbersome, restricts simultaneous use, and requires specific hardware augmentations of the display: touch layers, cameras, or dedicated input devices. Yet a rapidly increasing number of people carry smartphones and smartwatches, devices with rich input capabilities that can easily be used as input devices to control interactive systems. We contribute (1) the results of a survey on possession and use of smart devices, and (2) the results of a controlled experiment comparing seven distal pointing techniques on phone or watch, one- and two-handed, and using different input channels and mappings. Our results favor using a smartphone as a trackpad, but also explore performance tradeoffs that can inform the choice and design of distal pointing techniques for different contexts of use.