Augmenting Spatial Skills with Mobile Devices Doug Boari † , Mike Fraser † , Danaë Stanton Fraser ‡ and Kirsten Cater † † Bristol Interaction and Graphics, University of Bristol, Merchant Venturers Building, Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1UB, UK {boari, fraser, cater}@cs.bris.ac.uk +44 (0)117 9545144 ‡ CREATE Lab, University of Bath, 2 South, Claverton Down, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK D.StantonFraser@bath.ac.uk +44 (0)1225 386023 ABSTRACT Mobile devices are increasingly providing novel ways for users to engage with the spaces around them. However, there are few systematic studies of enhancing spatial ability with mobile devices, and applications such as turn-by-turn navigation systems have even been associated with a decline in spatial skills. In this paper we present a study based on the 1971 Shepard-Metzler mental rotation test but performed on a mobile-phone handset and a tablet PC. Our study extends the original experiment with the incorporation of touch and tilt interaction techniques, in order to determine if these affect the use and acquisition of spatial skills. Results suggest that the task is performed faster, and with no significant difference in accuracy, when participants rely on mental abilities rather than interaction techniques to perform 3D rotations. We also find significant differences between tablet and phone handset platforms under interactive conditions. We conclude that applications on mobile devices could be designed to enhance rather than erode spatial skills, by supporting the use of imagination to align real and virtual content. Author Keywords Mobile Interactions; Spatial Skills; Mental Rotation. ACM Classification Keywords H5.m [Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI)]: Miscellaneous; General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors. INTRODUCTION Without well-developed spatial skills, people are often hindered in learning, and ultimately even in their chosen profession [2]. Spatial skills are key to many types of everyday reasoning, as well as fundamental to fields such as mathematics, engineering and natural science [47]. The importance of visuo-spatial aptitude has been linked with academic excellence in many sciences [43], as well as lucrative careers [3]. In addition to science and academia, many day-to-day situations rely on the ability to use imagery to turn and manipulate common everyday objects. Parking a car requires the ability to make judgments of size and space. Packing your shopping groceries into the cupboards in your kitchen requires spatial reasoning, as do many sports and countless situations where one needs to visualise the movement of objects in 3D space. An area that relies heavily on spatial ability is navigation. With the proliferation of smart phones, and the affordability of in car GPS navigation systems, it has become commonplace to rely on turn-by-turn instructions to efficiently navigate as people become reliant on the technology and are not required to go through complex cognitive moves in order to complete the task [19]. Unfortunately, these technologies are eroding the kinds of behaviours and skills it is necessary to regularly exercise to effectively interact with the world around us [4]. In particular, there has been widespread concern that automatically contextualised and personalised spatial representations will lead to important skills becoming less practiced over time, affecting the population?s strategic ability to engage with their local environment [27]. Such a reduction in spatial skills could create increased levels of difficulty or risk when supporting technologies fail, disconnect, or blunder in their categorisation of our context. Furthermore there may be knock-on effects for a number of basic and important life skills that appear to be underpinned by spatial literacy [47]. Location tracking technologies, though in their infancy, will undoubtedly increase in capability and with this increase we expect greater alignment between mobile 3D data representations and automated spatial instruction. As software is increasingly designed to represent, and interact with the real world, designs will need to balance egocentric simplicity, against a user?s exocentric spatial capability [16], and against the freedom to choose and explore [33]. Developments in mobile platforms enhanced with GPS, accelerometers and electronic compasses thus provide challenges to the formation of internal representations of Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. CHI’12, May 5–10, 2012, Austin, Texas, USA. Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1015-4/12/05...$10.00. Session: Mobile Computing & Interaction CHI 2012, May 5–10, 2012, Austin, Texas, USA1611
