Touchless Interfaces For Public Displays

Abstract

Public displays have lately become ubiquitous thanks to the decreasing cost of such technology and public policies supporting the future development of smart cities. Depending on form factor, those displays might use touchless gestural interfaces that therefore are becoming more often the object of public and private research. In this paper, we focus on touchless interactions with situated public displays, and introduce a pilot study on comparing two interfaces: an interface based on the Microsoft Human Interface Guidelines (HIG), a de facto standard in the field, and a novel interface, designed by us. Differently from the HIG, our interface displays an avatar, which does not require an activation gesture to trigger actions. Our aim is to study how the two interfaces address the so-called interaction blindness -the inability of the users to recognize the interactive capabilities of those displays. According to our pilot study, although providing a different approach, both interfaces proven effective in the proposed scenario: a public display in a campus building's hall. CCS Concepts• Human-centered computing → Interaction design → Interaction design process and methods → User interface design.

They are looking at me!

“…The display runs an application that employs an Avatar-based touch-less gestural interface, built as an extension of the interface described in [6]. The layout consists of an Avatar placed in the middle of the screen, with all the other interface components arranged around it (see Figure 2).…”

Child-display interaction

“…For instance, Müller et al showed that interactivity can be recognized after less than three seconds using avatars [23]; however, their work considers users of various ages, without an in-depth analysis of children's behaviors. Similar limitations can be found in [8,17,18,33]. In the context of child-computer interaction, other facets of touchless gestural interaction have been investigated, mainly in order to understand the effect of such novel paradigm in learning activities [1,5,26], but also for gaming purposes [4,5,12].…”

“…In the context of pervasive displays research, many touchless gestural interfaces have been proposed and implemented. They have been used in order to interact with 3D virtual objects [6], to access information provision systems [7,18], to create and support playful interactions [23], and have many other applications. The use of touchless gestures, especially when applied to public displays, has many advantages.…”

“…Walter et al [34] focused their work on describing existing solutions found in literature, for user representation in touchless gestural applications. Recently, other works focused on the use of silhouettes or avatars [18,23], since they have proved to be very effective in solving some common pervasive display issues, namely interaction blindness (i.e. the inability of the users to recognize the interactive capabilities of a display [25]) and affordance blindness (i.e.…”

“…Indeed, an appropriate interface could strongly contribute to address both the interaction blindness and affordance blindness and could make the interaction itself more intuitive and straightforward. Many prior works suggested the use of avatar-based interfaces, where a predominant human-shaped entity continuously reproduces user movements [18,23,33,34]. These studies revealed the effectiveness of silhouettes, mirror images or avatars in communicating the supported interactivity and its touchless nature.…”