Spatial peripheral interaction techniques for viewing and manipulating off-screen digital content

Abstract

When an information space is larger than the display, it is typical for interfaces to only support interacting with content that is rendered within its viewport. To support interacting with off-screen content, our work explores the design and evaluation of several spatial off-screen exploration techniques that make use of the interaction space around the display. These include Paper Distortion, Dynamic Distortion, Dynamic Peephole Inset, Spatial Panning, and Point2Pan. We also contribute a formalized descriptive framework of the off-screen interaction space that divides the around-device space into interaction volumes and analyzes them based on different factors. This framework guided the design of an off-screen interaction system, called Off-Screen Desktop, which implemented our spatial techniques using consumer-level motion sensing hardware. To enable a more detailed analysis of spatial interaction systems, we also developed a web-based visualization system, called SpatialVis, that visualizes log data over a video screen capture of the associated user interface.