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Two-handed marking menus for multitouch devices

Published: 08 August 2011 Publication History

Abstract

We investigate multistroke marking menus for multitouch devices and we show that using two hands can improve performance. We present two new two-handed multistroke marking menu variants in which users either draw strokes with both hands simultaneously or alternate strokes between hands. In a pair of studies we find that using two hands simultaneously is faster than using a single, dominant-handed marking menu by 10--15%. Alternating strokes between hands doubles the number of accessible menu items for the same number of strokes, and is similar in performance to using a one-handed marking menu. We also examine how stroke direction affects performance. When using thumbs on an iPod Touch, drawing strokes upwards and inwards is faster than other directions. For two-handed simultaneous menus, stroke pairs that are bilaterally symmetric or share the same direction are fastest. We conclude with design guidelines and sample applications to aid multitouch application developers interested in using one- and two-handed marking menus.

Supplementary Material

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Supplemental movie, image and appendix files for, Two-handed marking menus for multitouch devices

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction  Volume 18, Issue 3
July 2011
208 pages
ISSN:1073-0516
EISSN:1557-7325
DOI:10.1145/1993060
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 08 August 2011
Accepted: 01 March 2011
Revised: 01 November 2010
Received: 01 June 2010
Published in TOCHI Volume 18, Issue 3

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  1. Two-handed multistroke marking menus
  2. multitouch

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  • (2022)Terrain Modelling with a Pen & Touch Tablet and Mid-Air Gestures in Virtual RealityExtended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491101.3519867(1-7)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2022
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