Superflick: a natural and efficient technique for long-distance object placement on digital tables

Moving objects past arms' reach is a common action in both real-world and digital tabletops. In the real world, the most common way to accomplish this task is by throwing or sliding the object across the table. Sliding is natural, easy to do, and fast: however, in digital tabletops, few existing techniques for long-distance movement bear any resemblance to these real-world motions. We have designed and evaluated two tabletop interaction techniques that closely mimic the action of sliding an object across the table. Flick is an open-loop technique that is extremely fast. Superflick is based on Flick, but adds a correction step to improve accuracy for small targets. We carried out two user studies to compare these techniques to a fast and accurate proxy-based technique, the radar view. In the first study, we found that Flick is significantly faster than the radar for large targets, but is inaccurate for small targets. In the second study, we found no differences between Superflick and radar for either time or accuracy. Given the simplicity and learnability of flicking, our results suggest that throwing-based techniques have promise for improving the usability of digital tables.