Ether-Mark: An Off-Screen Marking Menu For Mobile Devices

Given the computing power of mobile devices, porting feature-rich applications to these devices is increasingly feasible. However, feature-rich applications include large command sets, and providing access to these commands through screen-based widgets results in issues of occlusion and layering. To address this issue, we introduce Ether-Mark, a hierarchical, gesture-based, marking menu inspired, around-device menu for mobile devices enabling both on- and near-device interaction. We investigate the design of such menus and their learnability through three experiments. We first design and contrast three variants of Ether-Mark, yielding a zigzag menu design. We then refine input accuracy via a deformation model of the menu. And, we evaluate the learnability of the menus and the accuracy of the deformation model, revealing an accuracy rate up to 98.28%. We finally, compare in-air Ether-Mark with marking menus.Our results argue for Ether-Mark as a promising effective mechanism to leverage proximal around-device space.