Towards Understanding Interactions with Multi-Touch Spherical Displays

Interactive spherical displays offer unique educational and entertainment opportunities for both children and adults in public spaces. However, designing interfaces for spherical displays remains difficult because we do not yet fully understand how users naturally interact with and collaborate around spherical displays. This paper reports current progress on a project to understand how children (ages 8 to 13) and adults interact with spherical displays in a real-world setting. Our initial data gathering includes an exploratory study in which children and adults interacted with a prototype application on a spherical display in small groups in a public setting. We observed that child groups tended to interact more independently around the spherical display, whereas adult groups interacted with the sphere in a driver-navigator mode and did not tend to walk around the sphere. This work will lay the groundwork for future research into designing interactive applications for spherical displays tailored towards users of all age groups.