Vers des systèmes de fenêtrage distribués : l'évolution du drag-and-drop

This work examines the interactions at stake in environments where several display surfacesand pointing devices are used. These environments can be distributed or not. We are moreparticularly interested in drag-and-drop like techniques in the context of wall-size displays. Drag-and-drop is probably the most emblematic and widespreadly used technique of directmanipulation paradigms. Nevertheless it reaches its limits with new emerging distributeddisplay surfaces and wall-size displays. Its limits are of di erent kinds : material directinput devices and large surfaces are di cult to handle with regular drag-and-drop orsoftware –drag-and-drop over distributed windowing systems is not an easy game. Severalalternatives to drag-and-drop emerged over the past years either proposed by us or others.In this work we compared all of them both analytically and empirically. This comparisonleads us to design two new alternatives : push-and-pop and accelerated push-and–throw. Furthermore, we provided an implementation model for drag-and-drop and its alternatives.This model is based on the instrumental interaction model. We further built PoIP which isan API based on our implementation model to carry out drag-and-drop like operations. Themain contribution of this API is in its support for both distributed surfaces and heterogeneousinteraction styles.