Child–display interaction: Lessons learned on touchless avatar-based large display interfaces

Abstract

During the last decade, touchless gestural interfaces have been widely studied as one of the most promising interaction paradigms in the context of pervasive displays. In particular, avatars and silhouettes have proved to be effective in making the touchless capacity of displays self-evident. In this paper, we focus on a child–display interaction approach to avatar-based touchless gestural interfaces. We believe that large displays offer an opportunity to stimulate children’s experiences and engagement; for instance, learning about art is very engaging for children but can bring a number of challenges. Our study aims to contribute to the literature on both pervasive displays and child–computer interaction by reporting the results of a study involving 107 children aged 2 to 10 years. The main purposes of this study were to discover: (1) whether an avatar (movable or immovable) provides interactions that are intuitive for children and therefore help to overcome so-called “affordance blindness”; (2) whether an avatar-based touchless interface makes children’s experiences engaging and enjoyable therefore improving recall of content provided through the interaction (learning about art). The study unveiled relevant outcomes in terms of affordance blindness and two-handed interactions. We provide evidence indicating that chronological age influences the style of child–avatar interaction. Finally, it is suggested that avatars could facilitate the development of new effective educational technologies for young children.

Audio Matters Too: How Audial Avatar Customization Enhances Visual Avatar Customization

“…Audial customization could enhance video instruction [40,166] (e.g., lecture videos [120,121,164]), massive open online courses (MOOCs) [77], intelligent tutoring [42,173], e-books [50,194], and collaborative platforms [119,128]. This could involve different modalities such as tangibles [72], tabletop displays [116,147], interactive installations [144,191,195], augmented reality [29,35] and virtual reality [13,74,146], and digital streaming [41,179]. Additional investigation into different domains and modalities would elucidate whether audial customization can be applied more generally to increase user engagement.…”

Special issue on pervasive displays

“…Rubegni et al [6] investigate the use of on-screen avatars to guide children when interacting with touchless large displays. The idea is that the avatars would perform gestures to teach them to children, who can in turn use them to interact with the display.…”

“…This special issue revealed that there are yet some challenges that need to be addressed for pervasive displays and proposed solutions. This includes technical challenges, such as content scheduling [13], as well as human-centered design challenges, such as attracting attention [2], social acceptability [10], workload [8], and designing for different user groups [4,6]. Authors of articles in this special issue have shown that these areas require further research, and have also highlighted multiple opportunities which we divide in terms of use cases and methodologies: Novel use cases: There is a myriad of use cases for which pervasive displays can be particularly promising.…”

“…Authors of articles in this special issue have shown that these areas require further research, and have also highlighted multiple opportunities which we divide in terms of use cases and methodologies: Novel use cases: There is a myriad of use cases for which pervasive displays can be particularly promising. Rubegni et al [6] and Li et al [4] developed pervasive display applications that address challenges experienced by children and older adults respectively. A number of novel applications for pervasive displays were proposed, including creating virtual partitions between workers in open workspaces [3], place-based communication [5], crowdsourcing [7], and even large floor displays for automotive manufacturing [9].…”