A collocated multi-mobile collaborative system with hover connectivity initiation and seamless multi-touch interactivity

This research focuses on the collocated multi-mobile system (CMMS) which combines multiple mobile devices to become one shared large surface that could provide tabletop interactivity and group collaboration. However, several usability issues are yet to be discovered: (i) the cumbersome and confusing process to calibrate and align display of multiple mobile devices (ii) the lack of multi-touch gesture that can span across the boundaries of multiple mobile devices. Hence, this research aims to study the performance and user experience of connectivity initiation and multi-touch interaction on a CMMS. The research creates a new way to align the display and to allow multi-touch support to spans across multiple screens. The research methodology used is the User-Centered Design (UCD) approach where the process starts from understanding requirements, designing, prototyping and evaluating through a usability test. There are three main studies were carried out which covered the preliminary study, connectivity initiation study and multi-touch study for CMMS. The studies used quantitative and qualitative approaches. During preliminary study, it was found that the initiating process to connect multiple mobile device was time consuming, confusing and cumbersome. The preliminary study also observed that users tended to perform a multi-touch gesture on multiple screens but currently multi-touch gesture is not applicable to existing multi-mobile systems. The first connectivity initiation study was conducted to evaluate several approaches to perform connectivity initiation. Two best approaches were identified based on its performance and users experience on the medium-fidelity prototype. The hover and the swipe approach were found to be the two of the best approaches in terms of shorter time completion, higher user preference ratings and lower perceive workload index. These two approaches were then implemented for designing the high-fidelity prototype. The first multi-touch study also showed that user preferred the seamless multi-touch setting when evaluate using medium fidelity prototype. The second connectivity initiation study was then conducted to compare between the hover and swipe approach based on users’ feedbacks. It was found that the hover approach was able to reduce the time required to perform the connectivity initiation by 25%, compared with the swipe approach. The user rated the hover approach better in term of perceive workload rating compare to swipe approach. The second multi-touch study also found that user experience was significantly improved when multi-touch across the devices was enabled. It was found that the seamless multi-touch setting help reduced the time completion by 25.29%, reduce the average movement by 20.18% and reduce the error rate by 58.3%. In general, the results supported that hover approach and seamless multi-touch interaction had improved the issues surrounding the connectivity initiation and multi-touch for CMMS. The findings of this research can contribute to the growing body of research on CMMS by implementing the proposed solution to further address similar issues in their research works.

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