Bimanual interaction

Validation level: 5. CHI, UIST, CSCW and TOCHI paper publication

Most tablets use just one hand for interaction, so the study designed a Bimanual interaction.

Publications
Copy Bibtex Wagner, J.; Huot, S. and Mackay, W. BiTouch and BiPad: Designing Bimanual Interaction for Hand-held Tablets. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 2317-2326, ACM, New York, NY, USA, CHI '12 , 2012.
Also featured in
Storyboard of Functions

Five spontaneous holds (portrait orientation). The authors applied a preliminary experiment to find out the natural holding position of users and define these holds separately.

Users can use the thumb and fingers of the support hand for interaction. Authors designed interactive zones on the edges of the tablet, corresponding to the holds.

BiPad. a) Fside zone is active; other zones are shrunken. b) Unused zones remain partially visible if commands were assigned.

Using a finger to conduct press-and-release action within a BiPad zone

Use presses the ‘stroke’ button with the index finger and adds additional finger positions below. The user can adjust the stroke size by holding down a second finger on the appropriate button.

Gestures offer additional degrees of freedom for the thumb in the corner (up-to-down, right-to-left and diagonal). Small stroke shapes indicate the direction of the gesture and its function

Evaluation
**Mean Trial Time for each TECHNIQUE by ORIENTATION. **Overall, BiPad techniques were more efficient than the one- handed technique we compared them with.
Evaluation
Tap performance according to HOLD.
Evaluation
Gesture performance according to HOLD in Portrait,
Evaluation
Gesture performance according to HOLD in landscape
Evaluation
Gesture performance according to HOLD for the thumb according to HOLD and ORIENTATION
Highlights:

Bimanual taps outperformed our one-handed control condition in both landscape and portrait orientations; bimanual chords and gestures in portrait mode only; and thumbs outperformed fingers, but were more tiring and less stable.
paperfile118-3

Limitations:

The study focus on the tablet. It would be nice to see how bimanual interaction works on other devices.