Visual separation in mobile multi-display environments

  • Authors:

  • Jessica R. Cauchard;Markus Löchtefeld;Pourang Irani;Johannes Schoening;Antonio Krüger;Mike Fraser;Sriram Subramanian

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom;German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarbrücken, Germany;University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MAN, Canada;German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarbrücken, Germany;German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Saarbrücken, Germany;University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom;University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Projector phones, handheld game consoles and many other mobile devices increasingly include more than one display, and therefore present a new breed of mobile Multi-Display Environments (MDEs) to users. Existing studies illustrate the effects of visual separation between displays in MDEs and suggest interaction techniques that mitigate these effects. Currently, mobile devices with heterogeneous displays such as projector phones are often designed without reference to visual separation issues; therefore it is critical to establish whether concerns and opportunities raised in the existing MDE literature apply to the emerging category of Mobile MDEs (MMDEs). This paper investigates the effects of visual separation in the context of MMDEs and contrasts these with fixed MDE results, and explores design factors for Mobile MDEs. Our study uses a novel eye-tracking methodology for measuring switches in visual context between displays and identifies that MMDEs offer increased design flexibility over traditional MDEs in terms of visual separation. We discuss these results and identify several design implications.