PalmRC: Imaginary Palm-Based Remote Control for Eyes-Free Television Interaction

Niloofar Dezfuli, Mohammadreza Khalilbeigi, Jochen Huber, Florian Müller, Max Mühlhäuser

EuroiTV 2012

EuroiTV'12 - Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Interactive TV and Video

TL;DR

What we did: We built PalmRC, an eyes-free, palm-surface-based television remote control that allows users to interact with their non-dominant hand while focusing on the television screen.

What we found: We found that participants could effectively touch nine distinct landmarks on their palm without visual attention, allowing for precise interactions with television interfaces.

Takeaway: Our work demonstrates that leveraging the palm as an input surface can enhance user experience by providing a device-less and intuitive method for interacting with television systems.

Abstract

User input on television (TV) typically requires a mediator device, such as a handheld remote control. While being a well-established interaction paradigm, a handheld device has serious drawbacks: it can be easily misplaced due to its mobility and in case of a touch screen interface, it also requires additional visual attention. Emerging interaction paradigms like 3D mid-air gestures using novel depth sensors, such as Microsoft’s Kinect, aim at overcoming these limitations, but are known to be e.g. tiring. In this paper, we propose to leverage the palm as an interactive surface for TV remote control. Our contribution is three-fold: (1) we explore the conceptual design space in an exploratory study. (2) Based upon these results, we investigate the effectiveness and accuracy of such an interface in a controlled experiment. And (3), we contribute PalmRC: an eyes-free, palm-surface-based TV remote control, which in turn is evaluated in an early user feedback session. Our results show that the palm has the potential to be leveraged for device-less and eyes-free TV remote interaction without any third-party mediator device. © 2012 ACM.