Leveraging Head Movement for Navigating Off-Screen Content on Large Curved Displays

TL;DR

This paper investigates using head movements to navigate off-screen content on large curved displays, demonstrating that polynomial rate control improves efficiency and user experience over traditional methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel head movement-based control technique with polynomial rate control, outperforming standard controllers in 360-degree workspace navigation.

Findings

Polynomial rate control yields fastest trial times.

Users prefer head-based navigation over traditional controllers.

Head movements effectively access off-screen content.

Abstract

Large curved displays are ideal for viewing 360 degree content, such as 3D maps, but typically restrict users to a 180 degree viewport, leaving information off-screen. Since users naturally direct their heads toward regions on-screen before interacting, head movements offer a promising alternative for workspace manipulation to bring off-screen content into view. We explore rate control functions (linear, sigmoid, polynomial) and zone control functions (continuous, friction, interrupted, additive) to translate head rotations into workspace control, enabling users to access off-screen content. Polynomial rate control emerges as the best choice, achieving the fastest trial times and highest subjective ratings. Using a map navigation task, our second study demonstrates that users perform better with the polynomial head-based technique than with the industry-standard controller-based methods, click-and-drag and joystick-push, for 360\degree workspace navigation. Based on these findings, we provide guidelines to inform the design of future 360\degree workspace navigation techniques for large curved displays.