InformationSense : Trade-offs for the Design and the Implementation of a Large Highly Deformable Cloth Display

Abstract

Deformable displays can provide two major benefits compared to rigid displays: Objects of different shapes and deformabilities, situated in our physical environment, can be equipped with deformable displays, and users can benefit from their pre-existing knowledge about the interaction with physical objects when interacting with deformable displays. In this article we present InformationSense, a large, highly deformable cloth display. The article contributes to two research areas in the context of deformable displays: It presents an approach for the tracking of large, highly deformable surfaces, and it presents one of the first UX analyses of cloth displays that will help with the design of future interaction techniques for this kind of display. The comparison of InformationSense with a rigid display interface unveiled the trade-off that while users are able to interact with InformationSense more naturally and significantly preferred InformationSense in terms of joy of use, they preferred the rigid display interfaces in terms of efficiency. This suggests that deformable displays are already suitable if high hedonic qualities are important but need to be enhanced with additional digital power if high pragmatic qualities are required.