Determining the benefits of direct-touch, bimanual, and multifinger input on a multitouch workstation

Multitouch workstations support direct-touch, bimanual, and multifinger interaction. Previous studies have separately examined the benefits of these three interaction attributes over mouse-based interactions. In contrast, we present an empirical user study that considers these three interaction attributes together for a single task, such that we can quantify and compare the performances of each attribute. In our experiment users select multiple targets using either a mouse-based workstation equipped with one mouse, or a multitouch workstation using either one finger, two fingers (one from each hand), or multiple fingers. We find that the fastest multitouch condition is about twice as fast as the mouse-based workstation, independent of the number of targets. Direct-touch with one finger accounts for an average of 83% of the reduction in selection time. Bimanual interaction, using at least two fingers, one on each hand, accounts for the remaining reduction in selection time. Further, we...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: GRAPHICSINTERFACE
• Authors: Kenrick Kin, Maneesh Agrawala, Tony DeRose
• Keywords: Computer Graphics, GRAPHICSINTERFACE 2009, Multitouch, Selection Time, Workstation