Designing for hover-and force-enriched touch interaction

Abstract

As touch-based interfaces become more popular, there are attempts to enhance the touch interface by making the interface more sensitive to the finger. This means that touch surfaces not only sense the location of a finger contact, but also other properties such as a finger hover or the applied force. In this chapter, we summarize the properties of hover-and force-enriched touch and what we should consider to design rich-touch interactions based on the findings from previous works. We present design strategies for rich-touch interactions and example applications, which we developed with the novel touchpad prototype that is capable of measuring a finger hover as well as the finger force applied to the screen. We measured the performance of using rich touch and collected users’ feedback through the experiments.