FaceUI: Leveraging Front-Facing Camera Input to Access Mid-Air Spatial Interfaces on Smartphones

Thuan Vo, Marium E Jannat, David Ahlström, Khalad Hasan

Keywords: Smartphones, Face Input, Face-Centered Interfaces, Spatial User Interface

Abstract: We present FaceUI, a novel strategy to access mid-air face-centered spatial interfaces with off-the-shelf smartphones. FaceUI uses the smartphone's front-facing camera to track the phone's mid-air position relative to the user's face. This self-contained tracking mechanism opens up new opportunities to enable mid-air interactions on off-the-shelf smartphones. We demonstrate one possibility that leverages the empty mid-air space in front of the user to accommodate virtual windows which the user can browse by moving the phone in the space in front of their face. We inform our implementation of FaceUI by first studying essential design factors, such as the comfortable face-to-phone distance range and appropriate viewing angles for browsing mid-air windows and visually accessing their content. After that, we compare users' performance with FaceUI to their performance when using a touch-based interface in an analytic task that requires browsing multiple windows. We find that FaceUI offers better performance than the traditional touch-based interface. We conclude with recommendations for the design and use of face-centered mid-air interfaces on smartphones.