Toward localizing audiences' gaze using a multi-touch electronic whiteboard with sPieMenu

Direct-touch presentation devices such as touch-sensitive electronic whiteboards have two serious problems. First, the presenter's hand movements tend to distract the audience's attention from content. Second, the presenter's manipulation tends to obscure content. In this paper we propose "audience gaze localization" as an interface design paradigm to cope with the problems. It is an attitude to maximize the usability of the application with respect to the presenter, while minimizing the negative effects of the presenter's manipulations from the perspective of the audience. Based on the paradigm, we develop a new electronic whiteboard system that supports multi-touch gestures and employs a special pie menu interface named "sPieMenu." This pie menu is displayed under the presenter's palm and is thus invisible to the audience, while kept visible to the presenter.