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Doris Hausen, Hendrik Richter, Adalie Hemme, Andreas Butz
Comparing Input Modalities for Peripheral Interaction: A Case Study on Peripheral Music Control
In Proceedings of the 14th IFIP TC13 Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT 2013). Cape Town, South Africa, September 2-6 2013.

In graphical user interfaces, every application usually asks for the users full attention during interaction with it. Even marginal side activities often force the user to switch windows, which results in attention shifts and thereby increases cognitive load. Peripheral interaction addresses this problem by providing input facilities in the periphery of the users attention. Recent work shows promising results by shifting tasks to the periphery and thereby reducing cognitive load when carrying out several tasks in parallel. Up to now, most of these peripheral interfaces rely on tag-based objects, tokens or wearable devices, which need to be grasped and manipulated, e.g., by turning, moving or pressing the device. To explore this design space further, we implemented three modalities for peripheral interaction with a desktop audio player application graspable interaction, touch and freehand gestures. In an eight-week in-situ deployment, we compared the three modalities to each other and to media keys (as the state-of-the-art approach and baseline). We found that all modalities can be successfully used in the (visual and attentional) periphery and reduce the amount of cognitive load when interacting with an audio player. With this work we intend to (1) illustrate the variety of possible modalities beyond graspable interfaces, (2) give insights on manual peripheral interaction in general and the respective modalities in particular and (3) elaborate on paper based prototypes for the evaluation of peripheral interaction.