Leveraging Gaming Interfaces To Control Interactive Television

Development of interactive media and devices provides users with a wealth of new services such as online streaming (music and video), game play, web browsing, or email available on their televisions. While this increase in choice is great for the user, an inevitable consequence of many of these systems is a more demanding and interactive user experience. An easy solution to this problem is to use a keyboard and mouse; replicating the standard PC experience. However, this approach can be intimidating to novice users, and goes against the “lean back” experience often associated with TV viewing. A better approach might be to leverage novel interaction techniques used in common game controllers and tablets. This paper reports on the results of a user study in which we examined the limitations and affordances of game controllers such as the Nintendo Wiimote, Microsoft Kinect and “second display” tablets in an interactive TV (iTV) context. Task completion time, accuracy and user satisfaction measures show that Wiimote is most liked and performed best in almost all tasks. 1 A report on this study was published as Cox D., Wolford J., Jensen C., and Beardsley D. “An evaluation of game controllers and tablets as controllers for interactive TV applications”. In Proceedings of the 14 ACM international conference on Multimodal interaction (ICMI’12). ACM, New York, NY USA, 181-188. Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI’13, April 27 – May 2, 2013, Paris, France. ACM 978-1-4503-1952-2/XX/XX. Soroush Ghorashi