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 interaction system that enables device-less and eyes-free control of televisions.

What we found: We found that participants could effectively and accurately touch five landmarks on their palm without visual attention, achieving over 90% effectiveness in mapping to the corresponding television interface.

Takeaway: Our research indicates that utilizing the palm as a remote control can enhance user experience by allowing seamless interaction with televisions, eliminating the need for handheld devices.

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.