Touch and slide

Abstract

With an increase in the computing power and capacity of mobile devices, many applications for desktop computers are now being developed for mobile devices. Mobile devices employed a touch screen in order to provide flexible input on small devices, yet there are still problems for applications with high DOFs, because touch screens use only the position of the contact point. There has been much research on developing a richer interaction technique for touch screen mobile devices, however, most of the research did not consider the features inherent to fingers in using touch screens. In this thesis, we propose an interaction technique that utilizes the lateral force comes from the feature of fingers: the ability to hold objects using friction. With the proposed interaction technique, users can perform both the traditional touch screen input with touch of a finger, and three DOF lateral force input with friction. We implemented a prototype device and conducted a user study to find a mapping set for applications and evaluated with three applications. The proposed system showed a lower error rate than the touch screen for precise inputs in high mobility situations.