Abstract
This work examines the interactions at stake in environments where several display surfaces and pointing devices are used. These environments can be distributed or not. We are more particularly interested in drag-and-drop like techniques in the context of wall-size displays.<br /><br />Drag-and-drop is probably the most emblematic and widespreadly used technique of direct manipulation paradigms. Nevertheless it reaches its limits with new emerging distributed display surfaces and wall-size displays. Its limits are of different kinds: material -- direct input devices and large surfaces are difficult to handle with regular drag-and-drop -- or software –- drag-and-drop over distributed windowing systems is not an easy game. Several alternatives to drag-and-drop emerged over the past years either proposed by us or others. In this work we compared all of them both analytically and empirically. This comparison leads us to design two new alternatives: push-and-pop and accelerated push-and–throw.<br /><br />Furthermore, we provided an implementation model for drag-and-drop and its alternatives. This model is based on the instrumental interaction model. We further built PoIP which is an API based on our implementation model to carry out drag-and-drop like operations. The main contribution of this API is in its support for both distributed surfaces and heterogeneous interaction styles.