Orientation-Based Interaction on Mobile Devices and Desktops - An Evaluation

What is it about?

Nowadays, mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets or smartwatches, are essential items in our daily life. Further, more and more people use smart mobile devices in their everyday work for remote controlling, observing diagrams, performing web analytics, etc. However, the full potential of mobile devices is not tapped yet; built-in sensors such as accelerometers or gyroscopes offer a wide range of interaction capabilities, which are still often not fully used in nowadays mobile applications. On the other hand, desktops are still the dominating working device, but with significantly differing interaction means. With additional hand tracking devices capturing the user's gestures additional input possibilities are available but still often unused. In this paper, we investigate on a concept for orientation-based touch-less interaction. Depending on the type of device - traditional desktop or a mobile device - we use an interaction metaphor called "Waggle"; utilizing of tilting and turning of either the user's hand or the mobile device itself for additional input possibilities.

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Why is it important?

Based on the results of two pilot studies for both environments, basic parameters for future design decisions are derived: on the one hand, the maximum angle for basic rotation axes are evaluated. On the other hand, different discretizations of tilt and turn angles are investigated. Based on the outcome of both studies the optimal configuration for the use of the Waggle interaction metaphor in future applications on both mobile and desktop environments are defined.