Imaginary Interfaces

Sean Gustafson - Ph.D student @ Hasso Plattner Institut
Daniel Bierwirth - Masters Degree from Hasso Plattner Institut, now mobile computing consultant
Patrick Baudisch - Chair of Hasso Plattner Institut

Presented at UIST Comference in 2010

Hypothesis: To what extent do users' visuospatial memory could replace visual feedback, and what the success rate would be between different input methods.

They split the experiment into three different user tests. The first had the users draw different shapes and symbols. The second had them draw a figure, then point to different parts of it after they drew it. Lastly they had the users point to different coordinates in an imagnary 2D plane. In each of these tests they measured how accurate the users were at doing the tests and the length of time taken.

In the first test they had to draw different shapes repeatedly. The results of each user were compared to each other to see how accurate each person was at drawing shapes repeatedly in an imaginary space. They found that the test subjects preformed better when having a reference point, such as their non-dominate hand in the shape of an L.

The second test required the subjects to draw a line with different corners. Then the subjects had to point to different numbered corners. The test measured to what degree of accuracy the subjects pointed to the shape in the imaginary space.

The final test had the subjects map out a 2D coordinate system in imaginary space. They results showed to what accuracy the subjects were able to measure away from their fingers.

Discussion:

This paper was very relevant to today's technological movement. It would be interesting to see this technology implemented for use by everyday people. The authors of the paper mentioned that things can only get as small as the screens that display information. At some point the screens cannot get any smaller because they become useless. The only problem with this technology is that it would require a large amount of pre-training before a user could successfully use the device.