Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble Équipe Ingénierie de l'Interaction Humain-Machine

Équipe Ingénierie de l'Interaction
Humain-Machine

TouchOver: Decoupling Positioning from Selection on Touch-based Handheld Devices

In Actes de la 23ème conférence francophone sur l'Interaction Homme-Machine (IHM 2011). pages 37-40. 2011.

Adriano Scoditti, Thomas Vincent, Joëlle Coutaz, Renaud Blanch, Nadine Mandran

Résumé

When compared to conventional desktop mouse input, touch input on handheld devices suffers from the lack of a main feature: that of a mouseover state that can provide users with dynamic pro-active information. In addition, with touch screens, selection precision is limited by undesired extra finger tracking during finger press and lift movements.

We propose TouchOver, a multi-modal input technique for touch-screen accelerometers-enabled handheld devices where positioning is performed with a finger on the touch surface, while selection is triggered by a gentle "tilt forward" of the device. By doing so, TouchOver adds a mouseover-like state and improves selection precision while remaining compatible with existing interaction techniques such as Shift devised to improve precision. Our formal user study shows a significant precision improvement over two other selection techniques as well as a good tradeoff between speed and accuracy.