Finger-count Shortcuts: a Novel Interaction Technique for Qgis

INTRODUCTION GIS continuously increase in complexity, more and more data are created as much features developed to treat them. On the user side, GIS software is now integrated in several processes such as emergency management. In this article, we study how novel Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) techniques can improve GIS usability, especially for making command selection easier and for enabling collaborative work. We propose an interactive setup (Figure 1) that enables co-located collaboration around an interactive tabletop. Tabletops favor social awareness, facilitate communication among users and make it possible for several users to interact with the same data. Moreover, multi-touch tabletops provide a way of interacting that is more natural and intuitive than traditional mouse and keyboard interfaces. We propose QGIS-MT, an extension of Quantum GIS (QGIS) for multi-touch tabletops. QGIS-MT makes it possible to use QGIS on multi-touch surfaces and favors collaboration. It also introduces a novel interaction technique, called Finger-Count Shortcuts, which allows users to navigate and activate numerous commands quickly and easily by performing simple finger gestures.