PalmRC: leveraging the palm surface as an imaginary eyes-free television remote control

User input on television (TV) typically requires a mediator device such as a handheld remote control. While this is a well-established interaction paradigm, a handheld device has serious drawbacks: it can be easily misplaced due to its mobility and in case of a touch screen interface, it also requires additional visual attention. Emerging interaction paradigms such as 3D mid-air gestures using novel depth sensors (e.g. Microsoft Kinect), aim at overcoming these limitations, but are known to be tiring. In this article, we propose to leverage the palm as an interactive surface for TV remote control. We present three user studies which set the base for our four contributions: We (1) qualitatively explore the conceptual design space of the proposed imaginary palm-based remote control in an explorative study, (2) quantitatively investigate the effectiveness and accuracy of such an interface in a controlled experiment, (3) identified user acceptance in a controlled laboratory evaluation comparing PalmRC concept with two most typical existing input modalities, here conventional remote control and touch-based remote control interfaces on smart phones for their user experience, task load, as well as overall preference, and (4) contribute PalmRC, an eyes-free, palm-surface-based TV remote control. Our results show that the palm has the potential to be leveraged for device-less eyes-free TV remote interaction without any third-party mediator device.