An Empirical Evaluation of Touch and Tangible Interfaces for Tabletop Displays

Comments

Franck Norman

Murat

Summary

The authors wanted to conduct a performance study on tangible interfaces and determine if there is an actual improvement in tangible interfaces compared to other ones. They compared speed and error rates for a touch interface and a tangible interface. They built a top projection tabletop system that can support both a touch and tangible interface. There is a camera mounted on top of the table to detect tagged objects placed on the table using ARTag. The table can also track multiple fingers. The experiment used a shelf and a wall. The touch interface had a toolbar that contains items to drag and drop into the work area. The tangible interface had real tangible objects. There were several interaction methods provided by the interface: addition, lasso selection, translation, etc.. The user study took 40 students and each had to implement a series of 40 layouts using both interfaces. The experiment showed that the users were faster with the tangible interface. They also concluded that manipulating the tangible shelves was much easier compared to the tangible walls. The user preference section indicated that the tangible interface was easy to use, but had more "fun" with the touch interface. Also, users stated that they were more stressed and irritated by the touch interface.

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Discussion

I think that this is a pretty good intro study into tangible interfaces. It is intuitive and is faster as the result shows. Speaking of results, this paper was also good since it went into depth about the results from the experiment. There were quantitative results (the error and completion time) and qualitative results (fatigue, easy to use, fun).

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Aurelien Lucchi, Patrick Jermann, Guillaume Zufferey, Pierre Dillenbourg. An Empirical Evaluation of Touch and Tangible Interfaces for Tabletop Displays. TEI 2010.