Paper Reading #9 Imaginary interfaces: spatial interaction with empty hands and without visual feedback

Comments:
Comment1-Jeremey
Comment2-Alyssa

Reference:
Imaginary interfaces: spatial interaction with empty hands and without visual feedback

Sean Gustafson, Daniel Bierwirth, Partick Baudisch UIST 2010 Conference Summary: This paper is about a wearable device that allows the user to perform interactions, and how this device relies on the users imagination.  These interactions are different for each hand.  With one hand, the user defines the drawing space by holding the forefinger, and thumb at a right angle.  The other hand is then used to sketch something that is stored. The sketches can be sent to someone on the other end of a phone line for example.  Also, if the user stops sketching, and breaks the drawing plane, they can reestablish the plane later, and have the data still stored.  Since, there is no screen to provide visual feedback, the users memory is important.  The authors conducted three user studies to test how the users memory would compare to visual feedback.  The first study dealt with simple sketches, and single stroke characters.  For the single stroke characters, the accuracy rate was high, but it decreased as the number of strokes increased.  The second study tested the movement while drawing effected performance.  The authors saw a decline in performance when the user turned between drawing and annotating what they drew.  The third study was on finding a point in the space based on a given coordinate.  The users were given a coordinate pair based on finger and thumb length units.  The study showed that the further the coordinate was from a finger, the less accurate it was. Discussion: This is an interesting design.  I like the fact that you can sketch something without needing to be at a computer.  However, I don't know how it would be received by the public It seems that there are not very many uses for the device.  Also, from what I read, the device is based on using the left hand for the screen, and the right hand for drawing.  As a left-handed person, I am interested if they have already developed southpaw devices, if they plan on developing them, or if they will just make us lefties suffer.