Is Moving Improving?: Some Effects of Locomotion in Wall-Display Interaction

Physical movement plays an important role in interaction with wall-displays. Earlier work on its effect on performance has been inconclusive, however, because movement has not been experimentally controlled. In a first experiment, we controlled participants' ability to physically move in front of a 3-meter wide 24-megapixel wall-display. Participants performed a classification task involving navigation using a zoom-and-pan interface. Results suggest that the ability to move does not increase performance, and that a majority of participants used virtual navigation (i.e., zooming and panning) and little or no physical navigation (i.e., moving their bodies). To isolate the effects of physical and virtual navigation, a second experiment compared conditions where participants could navigate using either only physical movement or only virtual navigation. The second experiment showed that physical movement does benefit performance. The results from the experiments suggest that moving may not be improving performance, depending on the use of virtual navigation.