Pre-Touch Sensing for Mobile Interaction

2016. Ken Hinckley, Seongkook Heo, Michel Pahud, Christian Holz, Hrvoje Benko, Abigail Sellen, Richard Banks, Kenton O'Hara, Gavin Smyth & William Buxton
Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Abstract

Touchscreens continue to advance including progress towards sensing fingers proximal to the display. We explore this emerging pre-touch modality via a self-capacitance touchscreen that can sense multiple fingers above a mobile device, as well as grip around the screen's edges. This capability opens up many possibilities for mobile interaction. For example, using pre-touch in an anticipatory role affords an "ad-lib interface" that fades in a different UI--appropriate to the context--as the user approaches one-handed with a thumb, two-handed with an index finger, or even with a pinch or two thumbs. Or we can interpret pre-touch in a retroactive manner that leverages the approach trajectory to discern whether the user made contact with a ballistic vs. a finely-targeted motion. Pre-touch also enables hybrid touch + hover gestures, such as selecting an icon with the thumb while bringing a second finger into range to invoke a context menu at a convenient location. Collectively these techniques illustrate how pre-touch sensing offers an intriguing new back-channel for mobile interaction.

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Citation

Hinckley, K., Heo, S., Pahud, M., Holz, C., Benko, H., Sellen, A., … Buxton, W. (2016). Pre-touch sensing for mobile interaction. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2869–2881). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858095, doi:10.1145/2858036.2858095

BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/2858036.2858095,
author = {Hinckley, Ken and Heo, Seongkook and Pahud, Michel and Holz, Christian and Benko, Hrvoje and Sellen, Abigail and Banks, Richard and O'Hara, Kenton and Smyth, Gavin and Buxton, William},
title = {Pre-Touch Sensing for Mobile Interaction},
year = {2016},
isbn = {9781450333627},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858095},
doi = {10.1145/2858036.2858095},
abstract = {Touchscreens continue to advance including progress towards sensing fingers proximal to the display. We explore this emerging pre-touch modality via a self-capacitance touchscreen that can sense multiple fingers above a mobile device, as well as grip around the screen's edges. This capability opens up many possibilities for mobile interaction. For example, using pre-touch in an anticipatory role affords an "ad-lib interface" that fades in a different UI--appropriate to the context--as the user approaches one-handed with a thumb, two-handed with an index finger, or even with a pinch or two thumbs. Or we can interpret pre-touch in a retroactive manner that leverages the approach trajectory to discern whether the user made contact with a ballistic vs. a finely-targeted motion. Pre-touch also enables hybrid touch + hover gestures, such as selecting an icon with the thumb while bringing a second finger into range to invoke a context menu at a convenient location. Collectively these techniques illustrate how pre-touch sensing offers an intriguing new back-channel for mobile interaction.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
pages = {2869–2881},
numpages = {13},
keywords = {multi-touch, mobile interaction, hover, grip, context sensing},
location = {San Jose, California, USA},
series = {CHI '16}
}