A multi-touch three dimensional touch-sensitive tablet

  • Authors:
  • SK Lee;William Buxton;K. C. Smith

  • Affiliations:
  • Computer Systems Research Institute, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 1A4;Computer Systems Research Institute, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 1A4;Computer Systems Research Institute, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 1A4

  • Venue:
  • CHI '85 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 1985

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Abstract

A prototype touch-sensitive tablet is presented. The tablet's main innovation is that it is capable of sensing more than one point of contact at a time. In addition to being able to provide position coordinates, the tablet also gives a measure of degree of contact, independently for each point of contact. In order to enable multi-touch sensing, the tablet surface is divided into a grid of discrete points. The points are scanned using a recursive area subdivision algorithm. In order to minimize the resolution lost due to the discrete nature of the grid, a novel interpolation scheme has been developed. Finally, the paper briefly discusses how multi-touch sensing, interpolation, and degree of contact sensing can be combined to expand our vocabulary in human-computer interaction.