Handoff is a synchronous object transfer technique in face-to-face collaborative work and is one of the low-level actions of collaboration that is smooth and natural in physical settings; however, in digital tabletop workspaces, digital handoff is often awkward and difficult to control. We carried out a series of studies to investigate how digital handoff could be improved in tabletop systems. We first observed people doing several real-world tasks around a standard table and found that handoff is as common in the real-world as deposit (an asynchronous tool transfer technique). The study identified several guidelines to support the design of handoff actions in digital tabletop system. We then examined 2D-handoff techniques; by running a pilot study, we compared the traditional handoff technique with the real-world tangible handoff technique, and found that the traditional digital handoff technique was not well suited for transferring objects on the tabletop. By analyzing the handoff mechanism we spot the bottleneck that affected traditional handoff procedures and designed a novel 2D-handoff technique, force-field technique, which alleviated this bottle-neck to solve this problem. Through a user-study we found that the force-field technique was significantly faster than current digital handoff techniques and as good as real-world 2D-handoff techniques. In addition, force-field handoff was most preferred by a majority of participants. We further designed and implemented a 3D-handoff technique that embodies our observations of how handoff occurs in the real-world setting. <p>Finally, we evaluated our design in a simulated digital-tabletop task with the goal of assessing the usefulness of various digital transfer techniques including standard deposit, traditional handoff, force-field and 3D-handoff. The results showed that on the digital tabletop system the percentage of using deposit, 2D-handoff and 3D-handoff techniques is similar with the percentage of using these techniques on the real world physical table. 3D-handoff was the most preferred and the most frequently used technique among the handoff techniques; and the force-field technique is preferred than traditional handoff technique.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:USASK/oai:usask.ca:etd-08242006-091310 |
| Date | 24 August 2006 |
| Creators | Liu, Jun |
| Contributors | Subramanian, Sriram, Keil, J. Mark |
| Publisher | University of Saskatchewan |
| Source Sets | University of Saskatchewan Library |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://library.usask.ca/theses/available/etd-08242006-091310/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Saskatchewan or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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