Intent-Gesture Relationships for Collaborative Information Visualization

Abstract

In this study we look at the relationship between gestures and intents when pairs of participants are collaborating around a large display with a graph. We aimed to find out what gestures paired with which intents, which gestures participants would find suitable for various intents, and how our findings could influence designing interactions with graphs being used for collaborative analysis work. We studied 8 pairs of participants and found 10 frequent gestures and 11 frequent intents. An exploration of the relationship between these gestures and intents found 15 frequent co-occurrences. We analyzed these findings and then proceeded to make design suggestions for enabling co-located collaboration interaction using large multi-touch displays. Throughout, we used a theory of technical intersubjectivity to guide our research. In particular, this helped us to position large multi-touch displays as enablers of intersubjective interactions, which facilitated our design process.iii