Usage and recognition of finger orientation for multi-touch tabletop interaction

Abstract. Building on the observation that finger orientation is an inherent part of human's interaction in the real world, exploiting finger orientation for multitouch tabletop interaction would facilitate more natural interaction techniques. We motivate this by means of examples where the finger orientation improves or enriches interaction. Afterwards, we present a simple and fast approach to detect the finger orientation reliably for multi-touch tabletop interaction. The steps involved are computationally cheap and therefore suit the needs of tracking software operating under time-critical conditions. We show that the presented approach enables the detection of finger orientation also for fingers that touch the tabletop surface only slightly. Further, recognition rates on real data gained from the camera within a multi-touch tabletop are presented in order to give a measure for the precision and reliability of the presented approach

Usage and Recognition of Finger Orientation for Multi-Touch Tabletop Interaction

Part 1: Long and Short PapersInternational audienceBuilding on the observation that finger orientation is an inherent part of human’s interaction in the real world, exploiting finger orientation for multi-touch tabletop interaction would facilitate more natural interaction techniques. We motivate this by means of examples where the finger orientation improves or enriches interaction. Afterwards, we present a simple and fast approach to detect the finger orientation reliably for multi-touch tabletop interaction. The steps involved are computationally cheap and therefore suit the needs of tracking software operating under time-critical conditions. We show that the presented approach enables the detection of finger orientation also for fingers that touch the tabletop surface only slightly. Further, recognition rates on real data gained from the camera within a multi-touch tabletop are presented in order to give a measure for the precision and reliability of the presented approach

AUGMENTED TOUCH INTERACTIONS WITH FINGER CONTACT SHAPE AND ORIENTATION

Touchscreen interactions are far less expressive than the range of touch that human hands are capable of - even considering technologies such as multi-touch and force-sensitive surfaces. Recently, some touchscreens have added the capability to sense the actual contact area of a finger on the touch surface, which provides additional degrees of freedom - the size and shape of the touch, and the finger's orientation. These additional sensory capabilities hold promise for increasing the expressiveness of touch interactions - but little is known about whether users can successfully use the new degrees of freedom. To provide this baseline information, we carried out a study with a finger-contact-sensing touchscreen, and asked participants to produce a range of touches and gestures with different shapes and orientations, with both one and two fingers. We found that people are able to reliably produce two touch shapes and three orientations across a wide range of touches and gestures - a result that was confirmed in another study that used the augmented touches for a screen lock application

Enhanced Multi-Touch Gestures for Complex Tasks

Recent technological advances have resulted in a major shift, from high-performance notebook and desktop computers -- devices that rely on keyboard and mouse for input -- towards smaller, personal devices like smartphones, tablets and smartwatches which rely primarily on touch input. Users of these devices typically have a relatively high level of skill in using multi-touch gestures to interact with them, but the multi-touch gesture sets that are supported are often restricted to a small subset of one and two-finger gestures, such as tap, double tap, drag, flick, pinch and spread. This is not due to technical limitations, since modern multi-touch smartphones and tablets are capable of accepting at least ten simultaneous points of contact. Likewise, human movement models suggest that humans are capable of richer and more expressive forms of interaction that utilize multiple fingers. This suggests a gap between the technical capabilities of multi-touch devices, the physical capabilities of end-users, and the gesture sets that have been implemented for these devices. Our work explores ways in which we can enrich multi-touch interaction on these devices by expanding these common gesture sets. Simple gestures are fine for simple use cases, but if we want to support a wide range of sophisticated behaviours -- the types of interactions required by expert users -- we need equally sophisticated capabilities from our devices. In this thesis, we refer to these more sophisticated, complex interactions as `enhanced gestures' to distinguish them from common but simple gestures, and to suggest the types of expert scenarios that we are targeting in their design. We do not need to necessarily replace current, familiar gestures, but it makes sense to consider augmenting them as multi-touch becomes more prevalent, and is applied to more sophisticated problems. This research explores issues of approachability and user acceptance around gesture sets. Using pinch-to-zoom as an example, we establish design guidelines for enhanced gestures, and systematically design, implement and evaluate two different types of expert gestures, illustrative of the type of functionality that we might build into future systems

Finger orientation as an additional input dimension for touchscreens

Since the first digital computer in 1941 and the first personal computer back in 1975, the way we interact with computers has radically changed. The keyboard is still one of the two main input devices for desktop computers which is accompanied most of the time by a mouse or trackpad. However, the interaction with desktop and laptop computers today only make up a small percentage of current interaction with computing devices. Today, we mostly interact with ubiquitous computing devices, and while the first ubiquitous devices were controlled via buttons, this changed with the invention of touchscreens. Moreover, the phone as the most prominent ubiquitous computing device is heavily relying on touch interaction as the dominant input mode. Through direct touch, users can directly interact with graphical user interfaces (GUIs). GUI controls can directly be manipulated by simply touching them. However, current touch devices reduce the richness of touch input to two-dimensional positions on the screen. In this thesis, we investigate the potential of enriching a simple touch with additional information about the finger touching the screen. We propose to use the user’s finger orientation as two additional input dimensions. We investigate four key areas which make up the foundation to fully understand finger orientation as an additional input technique. With these insights, we provide designers with the foundation to design new gestures sets and use cases which take the finger orientation into account. We first investigate approaches to recognize finger orientation input and provide ready-to-deploy models to recognize the orientation. Second, we present design guidelines for a comfortable use of finger orientation. Third, we present a method to analyze applications in social settings to design use cases with possible conversation disruption in mind. Lastly, we present three ways how new interaction techniques like finger orientation input can be communicated to the user. This thesis contributes these four key insights to fully understand finger orientation as an additional input technique. Moreover, we combine the key insights to lay the foundation to evaluate every new interaction technique based on the same in-depth evaluation