TapBoard 2: Simple and Effective Touchpad-like Interaction on a Multi-Touch Surface Keyboard

Abstract

We introduce TapBoard 2, a touchpad-based keyboard that solves the problem of typing and pointing disambiguation. The pointing interaction design of TapBoard 2 is nearly identical to natural touchpad interaction, and its shared workspace naturally invites bimanual pointing interaction. To implement TapBoard 2, we developed a novel gesture representation scheme for a systematic design and gesture recognizer. A user evaluation showed that TapBoard 2 successfully supports collocated pointing and typing interaction. It was able to disambiguate typing and pointing actions with an accuracy of greater than 95%. In addition, the typing and pointing performance of TapBoard 2 were comparable to that of a separate keyboard and mouse. In particular, the bimanual pointing operations of TapBoard 2 are highly efficient and strongly favored by participants.