Multitouch Radial Menu Integrating Command Selection and Control of Arguments with up to 4 Degrees of Freedom

Abstract

We design and evaluate a multitouch radial menu for large screens with two desirable properties. First, it allows a single gesture to select a command and then continuously control arguments for that command with unbroken kinesthetic tension. Second, arguments are controlled with 1 or 2 fingers for up to 4 degrees of freedom (DoF). For example, the user may select one command for 4 DoF direct manipulation (translation + scaling + rotation), or another command for 3 DoF camera operations (pan + zoom), using the same two-finger pinch gesture, but with different initial orientations of the gesture to disambiguate. We present a taxonomy to classify previous menuing techniques sharing the first property, and discuss how very few techniques have both of these properties. Our work also extends previous work by Banovic et al. in the following ways: our menu supports submenus and a fast default command, and we experimentally evaluate the effect of varying the number of rings in the menu, the symmetry of the menu, and the use of one hand vs. two hands vs. a stylus and hand.