An Empirical Evaluation of Touch and Tangible Interfaces for Tabletop Displays

Aure ́lien Lucchi, Patrick Jermann, Guillaume Zufferey, Pierre Dillenbourg

CRAFT - EPFL aurelien.lucchi, patrick.jermann, guillaume.zufferey, pierre.dillenbourg @epfl.ch

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Summary:

The article sets out to make a comparison between a touch and a tangible interface. In general touch interfaces are faster than touch interfaces. As touch interfaces take advantage of a broader range of human abilities. Most studies are based on Fitt’s law where time to acquire target is a function of the distance divided by the target size. In this article the digital desk is used in combination with the Bricks system.

Recently there has been an increase in the popularity of touch systems. Tangible systems are seen as more task specific. For the purpose of comparison, both the touch and the tangible systems were made as similar as possible creating equivalent virtual objects for the scale models. A variety of gestures were compared: Addition, Selection, Translation, Rotation, Scaling, Removal, Undo previous action, Submit, Select All, and Adjustment.

Forty experimental subjects were used in the experiment. They were give a total of forty warehouse layouts to implement on both interfaces. their time and accuracy were measured and compared. Overall, the tangible interface was significantly quicker than the touch interface. However, some actions were quicker in the touch interface than in the tangible one such as scaling walls. The poly sensory feedback provided by tangible objects, combined with our natural familiarity handling them was attributed to the overall increase in performance of the tangible interface.

Discussion:

An interesting comparison. However, I feel that it is a little unfair as we have all had a life time experience with tangible interfaces, by comparison our acquaintance with touch interfaces is very short. Given more time I feel that the performance on the touch interface would improve and potentially surpass its tangible counterpart. Additional feedback, other than visual, would have certainly improved the performance of the touch interface.