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Dissertation Defence: Hand Proximate User Interfaces: Design Space For Single-Handed, Always Available and Comfortable Interface for Head Mounted Displays

March 3 at 2:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Ahmed Shariff Mohommed Faleel, supervised by Dr. Pourang Irani, will defend their dissertation titled “Hand Proximate User Interfaces: Design Space For Single-Handed, Always Available and Comfortable Interface for Head Mounted Displays” in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science.

An abstract for Ahmed Shariff Mohommed Faleel’s dissertation is included below.

Examinations are open to all members of the campus community as well as the general public. This examination will be offered in hybrid format.  Registration is not required to attend in person, but please email pourang.irani@ubc.ca to receive the Zoom link for this exam.


ABSTRACT

Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) have been poised to take the place of smartphones in the future. Unlike the smartphone, HMDs can see and understand- and integrate information around us much better. While there are many hurdles HMDs have to overcome to reach their full potential, one particular challenge is the interaction technique. This thesis particularly focuses on 2D interactions such as navigating a menu or going through social media feeds. While there are numerous interaction techniques, they often have associated limitations – especially when considering how they could enable the HMDs to be a replacement for smartphones. This thesis proposes Hand Proximate User Interface (HPUI), where interactive elements are anchored on and around the hand and users interact with them using thumb-to-finger gestures. The visual cues of HPUI allow even novice users to start using it, they simply have to look at buttons anchored to one of the fingers and tap, like they would on a smartphone. On the other hand, it also has eyes-free affordance as a result of proprioception and tactile affordance, which one can increasingly rely on as one gets used to the layout of a given interface on HPUI. However, the interaction space on HPUI has unique characteristics such as non-contiguous, and constantly changing shape as the fingers move. This contrasting properties of HPUI results in two issues this thesis is exploring with a series of user studies: (1) How can user interfaces for HPUI should be designed such that they take into account the properties of the interaction surface of HPUI? (2) Is the user experience of HPUI affected by these properties of HPUI?

To address these questions we first define the factors of the design space of HPUI based on results from an elicitation study. Then we develop guidelines for developing applications using HPUI. We then evaluate the performance characteristics of HPUI and validate it with comparative analysis. Particularly, (1) we validate that displaying content on the hand and directly interacting with it is advantageous, (2) the performance of HPUI is atleast similar to comparable interaction techniques, and (3) that HPUI has eyes-free affordance as a result of its tactile and proprioceptive affordances. Finally, we introduce an HPUI toolkit to enable future researchers and designers to use HPUI in their work.

Details

Date:
March 3
Time:
2:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Venue

3187 University Way
Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7 Canada
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Additional Info

Room Number
ASC 301
Registration/RSVP Required
Yes (see event description)
Event Type
Thesis Defence
Topic
Research and Innovation, Science, Technology and Engineering
Audiences
Alumni, Community, Faculty, Staff, Families, Partners and Industry, Students, Postdoctoral Fellows and Research Associates