This thesis introduced a new form of interfacing with the Carmenta Engine on touch screen. Its results show that through using the technique of hand chords, several users can work with the one large touchscreen simultaneously.
Hand chords allow each person to “play” the touch screen with their hands, where the combination of your fingers touching the screen decide the functional outcome – just like playing the piano. For example, one user can zoom a map while another creates a focal lens in it. The screen can also be split in two and re-merged. Since the potential combination of chords is infinite, there is no limit to the potential functionality activated by playing the screen in this manner. All without a single button on the screen.
The user study indicates increased mutual awareness and perceived closer teamwork among participants. This technology could be especially useful in geospatial teamwork where mutual awareness and coordination is prioritized, such as military planning or emergency response.
Sharing a single, large touchscreen between several collaborating users is the research area of multi-user touchscreen interfaces, also named collaborative groupware. Collaborative groupware concerns how to best facilitate teamwork over such shared digital spaces. The technology is used in a number of high-technological and expert-dominated domains including emergency coordination, urban planning, military strategy, etc.
This thesis investigates the problem of how to facilitate such mixed-focus work on a multi-user touchscreen in a two-dimensional geospatial context – a digital map – while avoiding the problematic use of widgets and click interfaces.
Through a background study of previous work, a new solution is suggested. It is a handchord-input-based interface that uses hand-pattern recognition to interface with multiple users simultaneously and provides graphical tools to enable and enhance geospatial collaborative work. This solution is implemented and evaluated in two user studies. The first investigates the solution in the aspects of practical interfacing, tool impact, and hybrid collaboration on small teams of two. A second smaller expert user study evaluates the technique in the aspects of responsiveness, effectiveness, and representation; with more formalized procedures.
The results show that a strong majority of users in the first study could successfully and quickly learn chord-input interfacing, and use it to access a variety of functionality with effectivity and enhancement of collaboration. The results of the second survey received moderately positive feedback in all aspects, with reserved opinions for its usage potential. These results indicate that chord-based interfacing, successfully implemented, could contribute to improved teamwork and task-solving in relevant collaborative contexts.
Image source (both images in article): Heyman, Hugo.
Heyman, Hugo. Enabling geospatial hybrid-collaboration on a multi-user touch interface through hand-chord based interaction: Collaborative single-display teamwork without any widget or button (2024).
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