No Need to Stop : Menu Techniques for Passing by Public Displays

Although public displays are increasingly prevalent in public spaces, they are generally not interactive. Menu techniques can enable users to select what is interesting to them. Current touch screen techniques are unsuitable, because for many public displays, users merely pass by and rarely stop. We investigate command selection in this new context of passing-by interaction, in which users only have a few seconds to interact. We present six hands-free gestural techniques and evaluate them in a Wizard-of-Oz experiment. Based on the results of this study, we provide design recommendations for menu selection in passing-by situations. Introduction In this paper, we present and evaluate six hands-free gestural menu techniques for a new context of use for public displays: passing-by interaction (Fig. 2). Users do not need to stop to interact, but can interact while they keep on walking. This context of use is especially relevant in the case of frequent passers-by, who pass by the same interactive public display every day (e.g., in the subway station) on their way to work. Our contributions are: (1) to identify a new, important context of use of public displays: passing-by interaction, (2) to propose and evaluate six gestural interacCopyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI 2011, May 7–12, 2011, Vancouver, BC, Canada. ACM 978-1-4503-0268-5/11/05. Chat Wacharamanotham RWTH Aachen University [email protected] Florian Alt University of Duisburg-Essen [email protected] Jan Borchers RWTH Aachen University [email protected] Tongyan Ning Deutsche Telekom Laboratories RWTH Aachen University [email protected] Jörg Müller Deutsche Telekom Laboratories [email protected] Robert Walter Deutsche Telekom Laboratories [email protected] Gilles Bailly Telecom ParisTech, CNRS, LTCI, UMR 5141 [email protected] Fig. 1. Passing-by interaction at the exit of a subway station. Fig. 2. Passing-by interaction model.