Leveraging the Palm Surface as an Eyes-Free Tv Remote Control

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

CHI EA 2012

CHI '12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

TL;DR

What we did: We designed a palm-based interface for eyes-free television control that allows users to interact without the need for a traditional remote control.

What we found: We found that users can effectively and accurately touch specific landmarks on their palm to control television functions without visual attention, achieving an effectiveness of over 94% for palm landmarks.

Takeaway: Our work suggests that leveraging the palm as an interactive surface could significantly enhance user experience by enabling device-less and attention-free interactions with television systems.

Abstract

User input on television 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 for instance to be tiring. In this paper, we propose to leverage the palm as an interactive surface for TV remote control. Our contribution is two-fold: (1) we have explored the conceptual design space in an exploratory study. (2) Based upon these results, we investigated the accuracy and effectiveness of such an interface in a controlled experiment. Our results show that the palm has the potential to be leveraged for device-less and eyes-free TV interactions without any third-party mediator device.