Territoriality and behaviour on and around large vertical publicly-shared displays

Abstract

Large displays and information kiosks are becoming increasingly common installations in public venues to provide an efficient self-serve means for patrons to access information and/or services. They have evolved over a relatively short period of time from non-digital, non-interactive static displays to more elaborate media-rich digital interactive systems. While the content and purposes of kiosks have changed, they are still largely based on the traditional single-user-driven design paradigm despite the fact that people often venture to these venues in small social groups, i.e., with family and/or friends. This often limits how groups collaborate and forces transactions to be serialized. This thesis explores design constraints for interaction by multiple social groups in parallel on shared large vertical displays.To better understand design requirements for these systems, this research is separated into two parts: a preliminary observational field study and a follow-up controlled study. Using an observational field study, fundamental patterns of how people use existing public displays are studied: their orientation, positioning, group identification, and behaviour within and between social groups just-before, during, and just-after usage. These results are then used to motivate a controlled experiment where two individuals or two pairs of individuals complete tasks concurrently on a lowfidelity large vertical display. Results from the studies demonstrate that vertical surface territories are similar to those found in horizontal tabletops in function, but their definitions and social conventions are different. In addition, the nature of use-while-standing systems results in more complex and dynamic physical territories around the display. We show that the anthropological notion of personal space must be slightly refined for application to vertical displays. Lastly, I would like to thank those who voluntarily (and involuntarily) participated in the studies conducted as part of this research which without whom, this work would not be possible.v

Creating Your Bubble

“…Field notes, cross referenced with post hoc analyses of interaction data visualized as heatmaps corroborates the use of territories on the large display. Thus, we confirm Azad et al's [1]observations regarding the use of on-screen territories on LPDs.…”

“…Pairs completing a shared puzzle made up of 50 pieces worked within a personal space measuring on average 2.11 × 0.81m (σ = 0.46 × 0.14m), and we found no differences in the distances based on DoC. As in [1], participants moved unused pieces into storage areas, predominantly to the side of their working space. This behaviour is reflected in our measures since they include storage space, and were derived from the spread of all pieces belonging to any one puzzle.…”

“…As in [1], we used a within-subjects design with one independent variable: Degree of Collaboration (DoC), which varied the degree to which participants were required to collaborate with their randomly assigned partner. Five levels of DoC were used, ranging from least to most collaborative:…”

“…Following the development of initial concepts for large scale, public displays [27,23,8], recent work has explored their use as information kiosks [24], in settings such as libraries and museums [11], semi-public office spaces [12,8], and personal and private interactions in settings such as cinema ATMs and photo kiosks [1,25]. These interfaces provide an opportunity to redefine how we support lightweight and transient tasks such as wayfinding, information search, and entertainment.…”

A Review on Interaction Techniques on Mobile Phones

“…However, interaction blindness is one of the hindrance encounter when engaged user with deployed content on public touchscreen [30], the user may not realize a screen is interactive. During the serendipitous interactions typical of public display may not be discoverable [31].…”