Evaluating Body Tracking Interaction in Floor Projection Displays with an Elderly Population
The recent development of affordable full body tracking sensors has made this technology accessible to
millions of users and gives the opportunity to develop new natural user interfaces. In this work we focused
on developing 2 natural user interfaces that could easily be used by an elderly population for interaction with
a floor projection display. One interface uses feet positions to control a cursor and feet distance to activate
interaction. In the second interface, the cursor is controlled by ray casting the forearm into the projection and
interaction is activated by hand pose. The interfaces were tested by 19 elderly participants in a point-and-click
and a drag-and-drop task using a between-subjects experimental design. The usability and perceived workload
for each interface was assessed as well as performance indicators. Results show a clear preference by the
participants for the feet controlled interface and also marginal better performance for this method.
Due to the increasing number of elderly in developed
countries and the specific needs of this population we
tried to get an insight of the desirability of different
modes of controlling interaction in interactive floors.
A medium which, by being easily scaled, can mitigate
the visual perception deficits associated with old age,
and can promote physical activity. Thus, in this work,
two methods of interacting with virtual elements
projected on the floor were developed and tested for
differences in their usability, perceived workload and
performance ratings by an elderly population. The
interfaces consisted on either controlling the cursor
with the direct mapping of feet position onto the
projection surface or, alternatively, by mapping the
cursor position to the participant’s ray-casted forearm
on the surface. These interfaces were tested on two
different tasks, one mimicking a point-and-click
interaction, the other a drag-and-drop. Although the
NUI research field is extensive there is a lack of
studies that approach the floor projected interfaces
and studies with the elderly are even rarer. This study
gives a successful insight into the preferred modes of
interaction for this elder population. Contrary to our
initial guess, the results showed that from the two
proposed methods the “feet” interface was superior in
all the domains measured. It was shown that this
method was perceived as more usable in both the
tasks tested and at least less demanding in terms of
workload for the drag-and-drop task. In terms of
performance a marginal advantaged was shown also
for the “feet” method. This insight delivered by the
results will help in the development of systems
aiming at providing full body NUI for floor projection
displays such as in mobile robots.
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