Leveraging Physical Human Actions in Large Interaction Spaces

Large interaction spaces such as wall-size displays allow users to interact not only with their hands, like traditional desktop environment, but also with their whole body by, e.g. walking or moving their head orientation. While this is particularly suitable for tasks where users need to navigate large amounts of data and manipulate them at the same time, we still lack a deep understanding of the advantages of large displays for such tasks. My dissertation begins with a set of studies to understand the benefits and drawbacks of a high-resolution wall-size display vs. a desktop environments. The results show strong benefits of the former due to the flexibility of "physical navigation" involving the whole body when compared with mouse input. From whole-body interaction to human-to-human interaction, my current work seeks to leverage natural human actions to collaborative contexts and to design interaction techniques that detects gestural interactions between users to support collaborative data exchange.