Welcome to my last column as the author of Left-field. Over the last two years I hope I've been able to pick enough good research from other domains to peak your interest. I believe that by understanding disabled-user's interaction we enhance our understanding of all users operating in constrained modalities where the user is handicapped by both environment or technology. It is for this reason that I see fundamental research into users with disabilities as a natural preface to wide human factors research. I've really enjoyed writing these columns but I'd now like to hand this over to Yeliz Yesilada who has agreed to continue Left-Field from now on. However, for my last Left-Field I'd like to leave you with a paper from the Proceedings of the ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technology.

Mixed reality: are two hands better than one?

"For simulating hands-on tasks, the ease of enabling two-handed interaction with virtual objects gives Mixed Reality (MR) an expected advantage over Virtual Reality (VR). A user study examined whether two-handed interaction is critical for simulating hands-on tasks in MR. The study explored the effect of one- and two-handed interaction on task performance in a MR assembly task. When presented with a MR system, most users chose to interact with two hands. This choice was not affected by a user's past VR experience or the quantity and complexity of the real objects with which users interacted. Although two-handed interaction did not yield a significant performance improvement, two hands allowed subjects to perform the virtual assembly task similarly to the real-world task. Subjects using only one hand performed the task fundamentally differently, showing that affording two-handed interaction is critical for training systems."

Full Article: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1180495.1180503
Full Proceedings: Table of Contents