A Viewport Control Method using Metaphor of Flexible Materials

We propose a novel technique for scroll and zoom operations which regards the displayed content as a flexible material such as a piece of cloth. In the technique, when a user scrolls the content to acquire a new area, originally displayed area remains in the viewport with distortion. This helps users decide next operation, which leads to preventing them from doing unproductive scroll. We conducted experiments in which participants had to acquire on-and-off screen objects in a map using our technique or traditional scroll. From the results we found that our technique yielded as equivalent performance as the traditional one for simple off-screen acquisition and better performance for scrolling back to original position.