Disappearing Mobile Devices

Paper Written by: Tao Ni and Patrick Baudisch

Comments: Aaron Loveall, Christopher Starnes

Summary:

Disappearing Mobile Devices dealt with ideas of how minimizing mobile devices and their interface hardware would affect the use of a device. Devices such as laptops and cell phones have been minimized over the years but have been limited to the size they can become due to human constraints. Such constraints consist of the screen needing to be large enough for people to read and the keyboard has to be large enough for people to use their fingers to type. The smaller the device, the more difficult it can be for a person to interact with it. It discusses how touch, pressure, and motion have limits on how small the device can be and how a person can react with it. Now there were two different case studies that this paper discussed. Both dealt with motion and whether or not the device could detect the motion that someone has done, such as directional motions (left, right, up, down) that were used in case one. This case had 12 participants that were each asked to choose an item by performing the correct directional that was given to them. The chart for the results is listed below.

Reasons for the errors posted were described in detail, such as the participant shaking a little bit while holding the mouse or how they pointed the mouse when using it. The second case study dealt with the way people write an alphabet. The interface was given a preset "gesture" alphabet and many of the letters had different ways of writing them. This case had 24 participants that entered one character per trial and used either the Graffiti interface or the EdgeWrite interface that was provided to them. Before the trial they each practiced each character about 10 times and then performed 8 blocks that each consisted of all the letters of the alphabet in a random order. A picture for the alphabet is listed below. The first picture shows the alphabet used in the EdgeWrite interface while the second picture shows the alphabet for the Graffiti interface.

Both studies were done on the same mouse device that they created. The differences between the two was the marking case participants used their finger to motion while the second case for the alphabet stroke participants used their whole hand.

Discussion:

This paper is interesting because it's testing how small we can make devices before they stop doing their intended purpose. It seems quite difficult to miniaturize devices that human input is used for because of certain constraints that need to be there in order for a person to use the device. I would have liked to have seen a video on this study in order to get a better understanding of what the paper was discussing, but I think the general idea was to see how the device that they created would pick up different motions a person did with either their finger or entire hand. Some faults with the work may be in the way each interface was used. There could have been computer errors that were not seen at the time, or there could have easily been some user error since there different participants for each case. If they had used the same participants for both cases there may have been better results. Future work could include having a small screened interface that a person could interact with, or possibly making the device into another form. For these studies it was shaped like a mouse, but what if they tried making it into a pen like object which would make this device even smaller. It would be interesting to compare the results from both objects to see if the smaller one could perform just as well as the slightly larger one.