A comparison of motion and keypad interaction for fine manipulation on mobile devices

Ever since the introduction of products such as the Nintendo Wii or the Nokia N95, motion-based interaction has become en vogue in research and industry alike. The employment of this new form of interaction is the subject of extensive research, especially for mobile use. Tilt or gesture interaction allow for quick and intuitive manipulation since the device is already at hand. So far there is neither a consensus on which metaphors can support input based on device motion, nor what types of applications are benefited by this control. Motion-based approaches exist for coarse tasks such as selecting an entry from a menu, but how does such an input mechanism work for finer input? Further, it is important to scrutinise whether this new way of interacting really is an improvement over tried-and-tested keypad interaction. In order to address these questions, we present a comparison of tilt-based interaction with the established keypad interface for fine manipulation. For this we developed a new metaphor for tilt-based control we call MarbleControl, which can be used for a wide range of applications.