Change Blindness in Proximity-Aware Mobile Interfaces

Interface designs on both small and large displays can encourage people to alter their physical distance to the display. Mobile devices support this form of interaction naturally, as the user can move the device closer or further away as needed. The current generation of mobile devices can employ computer vision, depth sensing and other inference methods to determine the distance between the user and the display. Once this distance is known, a system can adapt the rendering of display content accordingly and enable proximity-aware mobile interfaces. The dominant method of exploiting proximity-aware interfaces is to remove or superimpose visual information. In this paper, we investigate change blindness in such interfaces. We present the results of two experiments. In our first experiment we show that a proximity-aware mobile interface results in significantly more change blindness errors than a non-moving interface. The absolute difference in error rates was 13.7%. In our second experiment we show that within a proximity-aware mobile interface, gradual changes induce significantly more change blindness errors than instant changes---confirming expected change blindness behavior. Based on our results we discuss the implications of either exploiting change blindness effects or mitigating them when designing mobile proximity-aware interfaces.