The effects of tactile feedback and movement alteration on interaction and awareness with digital embodiments
Abstract
Collaborative tabletop systems can employ direct touch, where people’s real arms and hands manipulate objects, or indirect input, where people are represented on the table with digital embodiments. The input type and the resulting embodiment dramatically influence tabletop interaction: in particular, the touch avoidance that naturally governs people’s touching and crossing behavior with physical arms is lost with digital embodiments. One result of this loss is that people are less aware of each others’ arms, and less able to coordinate actions and protect personal territories. To determine whether there are strategies that can influence group interaction on shared digital tabletops, we studied augmented digital arm embodiments that provide tactile feedback or movement alterations when people touched or crossed arms. The study showed that both augmentation types changed people’s behavior (people crossed less than half as often) and also changed their perception (people felt more aware of the other person’s arm, and felt more awkward when touching). This work shows how groupware designers can influence people’s interaction, awareness, and coordination abilities when physical constraints are absent.
Citation
Doucette , A , Mandryk , R L , Gutwin , C , Nacenta , M & Pavlovych , A 2013 , The effects of tactile feedback and movement alteration on interaction and awareness with digital embodiments . in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '13) . CHI '13 , ACM , New York, NY, USA , pp. 1891-1900 . https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2466250
Publication
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '13)
Type
Conference item
Rights
© ACM 2013. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in the Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13), http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2466250 The copy of record of the paper can be found in: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2470654.2466250
Description
We thank NSERC, Surfnet, and the Walter C. Sumner fellowship for funding.Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.