Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential to transform knowledge work. One advantage of VR knowledge work is that it allows extending 2D displays into the third dimension, enabling new operations, such as selecting overlapping objects or displaying additional layers of information. On the other hand, mobile knowledge workers often work on established mobile devices, such as tablets, limiting interaction with those devices to a small input space. This challenge of a constrained input space is intensified in situations when VR knowledge work is situated in cramped environments, such as airplanes and touchdown spaces.
In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of interacting jointly between an immersive VR head-mounted display and a tablet within the context of knowledge work. Specifically, we 1) design, implement and study how to interact with information that reaches beyond a single physical touchscreen in VR; 2) design and evaluate a set of interaction concepts; and 3) build example applications and gather user feedback on those applications.
We describe tap tips, a technique for providing touch-screen target location hints. Tap tips are lightweight in that they are non-modal, appear only when needed, require a minimal number of user gestures, and do not add to the standard touchscreen gesture vocabulary. We discuss our implementation of tap tips in an electronic guidebook system and some usability test results.
This research proposes Finger Based Technique (FBT) for non-visual touch screen device interaction designed for blind users. Based on the proposed technique, the blind user can access virtual keys based on finger holding positions. Three different models have been proposed. They are Single Digit Finger-Digit Input (FDI), Double Digit FDI for digital text entry, and Finger-Text Input (FTI) for normal text entry. All the proposed models were implemented with voice feedback while enabling touch as the input gesture. The models were evaluated with 7 blind participants with Samsung Galaxy S2 appara…
Shared Boundary Interfaces: can one fit all? A controlled study on virtual reality vs touch-screen interfaces on persons with Neurodevelopmental Disorders
Older adults increasingly adopt small-screen devices, but limited motor dexterity hinders their ability to type effectively. While a 9-key (T9) keyboard allocates larger space to each key, it is shared by multiple consecutive letters. Consequently, users must interrupt their gestures when typing consecutive letters, leading to inefficiencies and poor user experience. Thus, we proposed a novel keyboard that leverages the currently unused key 1 to duplicate letters from the previous key, allowing the entry of consecutive letters without interruptions. A user study with 12 older adults showed tha…
Modern trends in interface design for office equipment using controls on touch surfaces create greater obstacles for blind and visually impaired users and contribute to an environment of dependency in work settings. We believe that \textit{conversational user interfaces} (CUIs) offer a reasonable alternative to touchscreen interactions enabling more access and most importantly greater independence for blind knowledge workers. We present a case study of our work to develop a conversational user interface for accessibility for multifunction printers. We also describe our approach to conversation…
Modern knowledge workers typically need to use multiple resources, such as documents, web pages, and applications, at the same time. This complexity in their computing environments forces workers to restore various resources in the course of their work. However, conventional curation methods like bookmarks, recent document histories, and file systems place limitations on effective retrieval. Such features typically work only for resources of one type within one application, ignoring the interdependency between resources needed for a single task. In addition, text-based handles do not provide r…
Center touchscreens are the main HMI (Human-Machine Interface) between the driver and the vehicle. They are becoming, larger, increasingly complex and replace functions that could previously be controlled using haptic interfaces. To ensure that touchscreen HMI can be operated safely, they are subject to strict regulations and elaborate test protocols. Those methods and user trials require fully functional prototypes and are expensive and time-consuming. Therefore it is desirable to estimate the workload of specific interfaces or interaction sequences as early as possible in the development pro…
Taller and sleeker smartphone devices are becoming the new norm. More screen space and very responsive touchscreens have made for enjoyable experiences available to us at all times. However, after years of interacting with smaller, portable devices, we still try to use these large smartphones on the go, and do not want to change how, where, and when we interact with them. The older devices were easier to use with one hand, when mobile. Now, with bigger devices, users have trouble accessing all parts of the screen with one hand. We need to recognize the limitations in usability due to these lar…
Navigating spaces is an embodied experience. Examples can vary from rescue workers trying to save people from natural disasters; a tourist finding their way to the nearest coffee shop, or a gamer solving a maze. Virtual reality allows these experiences to be simulated in a controlled virtual environment. However, virtual reality users remain anchored in the real world and the conventions by which the virtual environment is deployed influence user performance. There is currently a need to evaluate the degree of influence imposed by extrinsic factors and virtual reality hardware on its users. Tr…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Mobile User Interface Summarization generates succinct language descriptions of mobile screens for conveying important contents and functionalities of the screen, which can be useful for many language-based application scenarios. We present Screen2Words, a novel screen summarization approach that automatically encapsulates essential information of a UI screen into a coherent language phrase. Summarizing mobile screens requires a holistic understanding of the multi-modal data of mobile UIs, including text, image, structures as well as UI semantics, motivating our multi-modal learning approach. …
The augmented-reality head-mounted display (e.g., Microsoft HoloLens) is one of the most innovative technologies in multimedia and human-computer interaction in recent years. Despite the emerging research of its applications on engineering, education, medicines, to name a few, its impact on users' movement behavior is still underexplored. The movement behavior, especially for office workers with sedentary lifestyles, is related to many chronic conditions. Unlike the traditional screens, the augmented-reality head-mounted display (AR-HMD) could enable mobile virtual screens, which might impact …
Virtual Reality (VR) can enhance the display and interaction of mobile knowledge work and in particular, spreadsheet applications. While spreadsheets are widely used yet are challenging to interact with, especially on mobile devices, using them in VR has not been explored in depth. A special uniqueness of the domain is the contrast between the immersive and large display space afforded by VR, contrasted by the very limited interaction space that may be afforded for the information worker on the go, such as an airplane seat or a small work-space. To close this gap, we present a tool-set for enh…
Working with organs and extracted tissue blocks is an essential task in surgery and anatomy environments. To prepare specimens from human donors for analysis, wet-bench workers must dissect human tissue and collect metadata for downstream analysis, including information about the spatial origin of tissue. The Registration User Interface (RUI) was developed to allow stakeholders in the Human Biomolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) to register tissue blocks, i.e., to record the size, position, and orientation of human tissue data with regard to reference organs. In this paper, we compare three setup…
