Combing multiple gesture sensing technologies to interact with public displays

Abstract

Over the past years, the urban landscape has witnessed a revolution with regard to information delivery systems. With the emergence of new hardware sensing technologies, such as multi-touch enabled screens and camera-based technologies, the information delivery business model shifted away from the classic static conventional paradigm to a new dynamic, novel interactive one. The adoption of the new paradigm was proven to have a positive impact with respect to efficiency and effectiveness of information delivery. Public displays are considered to be one of the newest and most popular mediums used when it comes to addressing larger audience. Although a lot of current interactive applications are now deployed on public displays, only a few focus on the different interaction modalities available based on the proximity of users with respect to the screen. In the study presented in this thesis we declare a system design model combining two different motion sensing technologies to utilize and take full advantage of the interactive spectrum in front of a public display system. Based on the relative proximity from the public display, the model introduced four different interactive zones, each with different granularity of interaction. The study also demonstrates how a seamless transition across the different zones is essential to guarantee an immersive, undisturbed user experience. Moreover, the study proposed a user-defined design guideline for gestural interaction within and across the different interactive zones.