Can “touch“ get annoying?

While touch interaction with tabletops is now widely accepted as a very natural and intuitive form of input, only little research has been carried out to understand whether and how it might interfere with our natural ways of gestural communication. This poster presents a study that aims at understanding the importance of touching physical and virtual artifacts during discussion or collaboration around a table. Furthermore, it focuses on how users compensate for conflicts between non-interactivity and interactivity created by unintended touch interaction when using a multi-touch enabled tabletop. In our study, we asked participants to explain illustrations of technical or physical mechanisms, such as the workings of an airplane wing. We observed whether and how they used gestures to do so on a touch sensitive Microsoft Surface tabletop and on a sheet of paper. Our results suggest that touching is an essential part of such an activity and that the compensation strategies people adapt to avoid conflicts may reduce precision of communication and increase the physical strain on the user.