SurfAirs Supplemental Material

Emmanuel Courtoux, Caroline Appert & Olivier Chapuis
Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, Inria, LISN, Orsay, France
email: first.last@lisn.upsaclay.fr

Large vertical surfaces such as wall displays allow users to work with a very large and high-resolution workspace. Such displays promote physical navigation: users can step close to the display to see details, but also move away to get a wider view of the workspace. In terms of input, current solutions usually combine direct touch on the wall with input on a handheld device, disconnecting close and distant input rather than treating it as a continuum. SurfAirs are physical controllers that users can manipulate on screen (surface input), in the air (mid-air input), and transition from the surface to the air during a single manipulation (hybrid input).

Supplemental Material for:

Emmanuel Courtoux, Caroline Appert, and Olivier Chapuis. 2023. SurfAirs: Surface + Mid-air Input for Large Vertical Displays. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23), ACM, 15 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580877

Fabrication

A SurfAir is made of separate parts that are then assembled together. The main structure consists of 3D printed parts, springs, a suction cup, and markers.

STL files to print the two types of SurfAirs that are evaluated in Experiment 1 (SURFAIRS VS BARE HAND FOR MID-AIR INPUT): Handle and Torch.

The suction cup is a standard 20-mm diameter one, which generates a suction force of approximately 130 newtons.

The springs are made of steel (AISI 304L stainless steel). They are 25mm-long when free, 7mm-long when compressed, and feature 10 coils. Their inner diameter is 0.7mms. Their outer diameter is 0.9mms.

We used standard Vicon markers of 5mm-diameter, and 3mm-diameter screws and bolts.

Experiment Data