Laid-Back, Touchless Collaboration around Wall-size Displays: Visual Feedback and Affordances

To facilitate interaction and collaboration around ultrahigh-resolution, Wall-Size Displays (WSD), post-WIMP interaction modes like touchless and multi-touch have opened up new, unprecedented opportunities. Yet to fully harness this potential, we still need to understand fundamental design factors for successful WSD experiences. Some of these include visual feedback for touchless interactions, novel interface affordances for at-a-distance, high-bandwidth input, and the technosocial ingredients supporting laid-back, relaxed collaboration around WSDs. This position paper highlights our progress in a long-term research program that examines these issues and spurs new, exciting research directions. We recently completed a study aimed at investigating the properties of visual feedback in touchless WSD interaction, and we discuss some of our findings here. Our work exemplifies how research in WSD interaction calls for re-conceptualizing basic, first principles of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to pioneer a suite of next-generation interaction environments.