Should I Stay or Should I Go? Selecting Between Touch and Mid-Air Gestures for Large-Display Interaction

Users can interact with large displays in many ways, including touch and mid-air gestures. However, it remains unclear how these ways compare and when users choose one over the other. In a first experiment, we compare touch and mid-air gestures to identify their relative performance for target acquisition. In a second experiment, participants choose freely between touch and mid-air gestures and we artificially require movement to simulate situations where midair is considered beneficial. Results from the first experiment show mid-air to be overall slower than touch depending on the task; in the second experiment, participants mostly chose touch in particular for selecting small targets and they rarely switched between mid-air and touch. Results also show that when faced with an increasing cost of using touch in the form of movement, participants chose mid-air over touch; touch remains as fast as mid-air on average.