An Evaluation of Touch and Pressure-Based Scrolling and Haptic Feedback for In-car Touchscreens

An in-car study was conducted to examine different input techniques for list-based scrolling tasks and the effectiveness of haptic feedback for in-car touchscreens. The use of physical switchgear on centre consoles is decreasing which allows designers to develop new ways to interact with in-car applications. However, these new methods need to be evaluated to ensure they are usable. Therefore, three input techniques were tested: direct scrolling, pressure-based scrolling and scrolling using onscreen buttons on a touchscreen. The results showed that direct scrolling was less accurate than using onscreen buttons and pressure input, but took almost half the time when compared to the onscreen buttons and was almost three times quicker than pressure input. Vibrotactile feedback did not improve input performance but was preferred by the users. Understanding the speed vs. accuracy trade-off between these input techniques will allow better decisions when designing safer in-car interfaces for scrolling applications

28 frames later: predicting screen touches from back-of-device grip changes

We demonstrate that front-of-screen targeting on mobile phones can be predicted from back-of-device grip manipulations. Using simple, low-resolution capacitive touch sensors placed around a standard phone, we outline a machine learning approach to modelling the grip modulation and inferring front-of-screen touch targets. We experimentally demonstrate that grip is a remarkably good predictor of touch, and we can predict touch position 200ms before contact with an accuracy of 18mm

WRISTBAND.IO:expanding input and output spaces of a Smartwatch

Smartwatches are characterized by their small size designed for wearability, discretion, and mobile interactions. Most of the interactivity, however, is limited to the size of the display, introducing issues such as screen occlusion and limited information density. We introduce Wristband.io, a smartwatch with an extended interaction space along the wristband, enabling (i) back-of-band interaction using a touchpad, (ii) a low resolution ambient watchband display for offscreen notification, and (iii) tangible buttons for quick, eyes-free input. Insights gained through a study show that back-of-band input increases accuracy and task completion rates for smaller on-screen targets. We probe the design space of Wristband.io with three applications

WRISTBAND.IO:expanding input and output spaces of a Smartwatch

Smartwatches are characterized by their small size designed for wearability, discretion, and mobile interactions. Most of the interactivity, however, is limited to the size of the display, introducing issues such as screen occlusion and limited information density. We introduce Wristband.io, a smartwatch with an extended interaction space along the wristband, enabling (i) back-of-band interaction using a touchpad, (ii) a low resolution ambient watchband display for offscreen notification, and (iii) tangible buttons for quick, eyes-free input. Insights gained through a study show that back-of-band input increases accuracy and task completion rates for smaller on-screen targets. We probe the design space of Wristband.io with three applications

Interaction gestuelle à une main avec un smartphone : retours utilisateurs et application aux picophones

This paper presents a one-handed gesture command for the interaction with a picophone and any mobile device. We present an algorithm of 3D gesture recognition based on the filtering of accelerometer data. An experiment is detailed which shown the robustness of the gesture detection as well as the interest of such a one-handed command. At last, we report an application of this work with a picophone

Clip-on Gadgets: Expanding Multi-touch Interaction Area with Unpowered Tactile Controls

ABSTRACT Virtual keyboards and controls, commonly used on mobile multi-touch devices, occlude content of interest and do not provide tactile feedback. Clip-on Gadgets solve these issues by extending the interaction area of multi-touch devices with physical controllers. Clip-on Gadgets use only conductive materials to map user input on the controllers to touch points on the edges of screens; therefore, it is batteryfree, lightweight, and low-cost. In addition, it can be used in combination with multi-touch gestures. We present several hardware designs and a software toolkit, which enable users to simply attach Clip-on Gadgets to an edge of a device and start interacting with it

TrackballWatch: Trackball and Rotary Knob as a Non-Occluding Input Method for Smartwatches in Map Navigation Scenarios

A common problem of touch-based smartwatch interaction is the occlusion of the display. Although some models provide solutions like the Apple “digital crown” or the Samsung rotatable bezel, these are limited to only one degree of freedom (DOF). Performing complex tasks like navigating on a map is still problematic as the additional input option helps to zoom, but touching the screen to pan the map is still required. In this work, we propose using a trackball as an additional input device that adds two DOFs to prevent the occlusion of the screen. We created several prototypes to find a suitable placement and evaluated them in a typical map navigation scenario. Our results show that the participants were significantly faster (15.7 %) with one of the trackball setups compared to touch input. The results also show that the idle times are significantly higher with touch input than with all trackball prototypes, presumably because users have to reorient themselves after panning with finger occlusion

A longitudinal review of Mobile HCI research Methods

This paper revisits a research methods survey from 2003 and contrasts it with a survey from 2010. The motivation is to gain insight about how mobile HCI research has evolved over the last decade in terms of approaches and focus. The paper classifies 144 publications from 2009 published in 10 prominent outlets by their research methods and purpose. Comparing this to the survey for 2000-02 show that mobile HCI research has changed methodologically. From being almost exclusively driven by engineering and applied research, current mobile HCI is primarily empirically driven, involves a high number of field studies, and focus on evaluating and understanding, as well as engineering. It has also become increasingly multi-methodological, combining and diversifying methods from different disciplines. At the same time, new opportunities and challenges have emerged

Active PinScreen: Exploring Spatio-Temporal Tactile Feedbackfor Multi-Finger Interaction

Multiple fingers are often used for efficient interaction with handheld computing devices. Currently, any tactile feedback provided is felt on the finger pad or the palm with coarse granularity. In contrast, we present a new tactile feedback technique, Active PinScreen, that applies localised stimuli on multiple fingers with fine spatial and temporal resolution. The tactile screen uses an array of solenoid-actuated magnetic pins with millimetre scale form-factor which could be deployed for back-of-device handheld use without instrumenting the user. As well as presenting a detailed description of the prototype, we provide the potential design configurations and the applications of the Active PinScreen and evaluate the human factors of tactile interaction with multiple fingers in a controlled user evaluation. The results of our study show a high recognition rate for directional and patterned stimulation across different grip orientations as well as within- and between- fingers. We end the paper with a discussion of our main findings, limitations in the current design and directions for future work

Back-of-device Interaction allows creating very small touch devices

In this paper, we explore how to add pointing input capabilities to very small screen devices. On first sight, touchscreens seem to allow for particular compactness, because they integrate input and screen into the same physical space. The opposite is true, however, because the user’s fingers occlude contents and prevent precision. We argue that the key to touch-enabling very small devices is to use touch on the device backside. In order to study this, we have created a 2.4 ” prototype device; we simulate screens smaller than that by masking the screen. We present a user study in which participants completed a pointing task successfully across display sizes when using a back-of device interface. The touchscreen-based control condition (enhanced with the shift technique), in contrast, failed for screen diagonals below 1 inch. We present four form factor concepts based on back-of-device interaction and provide design guidelines for extracted from a second user study. ACM Classification: H5.2 [Information interfaces and presentation]: User Interfaces. Input devices and strategies