Facilitating peripheral interaction: design and evaluation of peripheral interaction for a gesture-based lighting control with multimodal feedback

Abstract

Most interactions with today’s interfaces require a person’s full and focused attention. To alleviate the potential clutter of focal information, we investigated how interactions could be designed to take place in the background or periphery of attention. This paper explores whether gestural, multimodal interaction styles of an interactive light system allow for this. A study compared the performance of interactions with the light system in two conditions: the central condition in which participants interacted only with the light system, and the peripheral condition in which they interacted with the system while performing a high-attentional task simultaneously. Our study furthermore compared different feedback styles (visual, auditory, haptic, and a combination). Results indicated that especially for the combination feedback style, the interaction could take place without participants’ full visual attention, and performance did not significantly decrease in the peripheral condition. This seems to indicate that these interactions at least partly took place in their periphery of attention and that the multimodal feedback style aided this process.