The Continuous Interaction Space: Interaction Techniques Unifying Touch and Gesture On and Above a Digital Surface
Date
2011-01-28T18:00:55Z
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Abstract
The rising popularity of digital table surfaces has spawned
considerable interest in new interaction techniques. Most interactions fall into
one of two modalities: 1) direct touch and multi-touch (by hand and by
tangibles) directly on the surface, and 2) hand gestures above the surface. The
limitation is that these two modalities ignore the rich interaction space between
them. To move beyond this limitation, we first contribute a unification of these
discrete interaction modalities called the continuous interaction space. The idea
is that many interaction techniques can be developed that go beyond these two
modalities, where they can leverage the space between them. That is, we
believe that the underlying system should treat the space on and above the
surface as a continuum, where a person can use touch, gestures, and tangibles
anywhere in the space and naturally move between them. Our second
contribution illustrates this, where we introduce a variety of interaction
categories that exploit the space between these modalities. For example, with
our Extended Continuous Gestures category, a person can start an interaction
with a direct touch and drag, and then naturally lift off the surface and continue
their drag with a hand gesture over the surface. For each interaction category,
we implement an example (or use prior work) that illustrates how that technique
can be applied. In summary, our primary contribution is to broaden the design
space of interaction techniques for digital surfaces, where we populate the
continuous interaction space both with concepts and examples that emerge from
considering this space as a continuum.
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Keywords
Touch, gestures, surfaces