PaperPhone: understanding the use of bend gestures in mobile devices with flexible electronic paper displays

Flexible displays potentially allow for interaction styles that resemble those used in paper documents. Bending the display, e.g., to page forward, shows particular promise as an interaction technique. In this paper, we present an evaluation of the effectiveness of various bend gestures in executing a set of tasks with a flexible display. We discuss a study in which users designed bend gestures for common computing actions deployed on a smartphone-inspired flexible E Ink prototype called PaperPhone. We collected a total of 87 bend gesture pairs from ten participants and their appropriateness over twenty actions in five applications. We identified six most frequently used bend gesture pairs out of 24 unique pairs. Results show users preferred bend gestures and bend gesture pairs that were conceptually simpler, e.g., along one axis, and less physically demanding. There was a strong agreement among participants to use the same three pairs in applications: (1) side of display, up/down (2)...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Byron Lahey, Audrey Girouard, Winslow Burleson, Roel Vertegaal
• Keywords: CHI 2011, Flexible Displays, Human Computer Interaction, Interaction Styles, Interaction Technique