AirTouch panel: a re-anchorable virtual touch panel

Abstract

To achieve maximum mobility, device-less approaches for home appliance remote control have received increasing attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose a screen-less virtual touch panel, called AirTouch Panel, which can be positioned at any place with various orientations around users. The proposed virtual touch panel provides a potential ability to remotely control the home appliances, such as television, air conditioner, and so on. The proposed system allows users to anchor the panel at the place with comfortable poses. If the users want to change panel's position or orientation, they only need to re-anchor it, and then the panel will be reset. In this paper, our main contribution is to design a re-anchorable virtual panel for digital home remote control. Most importantly, we explore the design of such imaginary interface through two user studies. In our user studies, we analyze task completion time, satisfaction rate, and the number of miss-clicks. We are interested in the feasibility issues, for example, proper click gesture, panel size and button size, etc. Moreover, based on the AirTouch Panel, we also developed an intelligent TV to demonstrate the usability for controlling home appliance.