Touch-sensing input devices

  • Authors:

  • Ken Hinckley;Mike Sinclair

  • Affiliations:

  • Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA;Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

We can touch things, and our senses tell us when our hands aretouching something. But most computer input devices cannot detectwhen the user touches or releases the device or some portion of thedevice. Thus, adding touch sensors to input devices offers manypossibilities for novel interaction techniques. We demonstrate theTouchTrackball and the Scrolling TouchMouse, which use unobtrusivecapacitance sensors to detect contact from the users hand withoutrequiring pressure or mechanical actuation of a switch. We furtherdemonstrate how the capabilities of these devices can be matched toan implicit interaction technique, the On-Demand Interface, whichuses the passive information captured by touch sensors to fade inor fade out portions of a display depending on what the user isdoing; a second technique uses explicit, intentional interactionwith touch sensors for enhanced scrolling. We present our newdevices in the context of a simple tax- onomy of tactile inputtechnologies. Finally, we discuss the properties of touch-sensingas an input channel in general.