Designing User-, Hand-, and Handpart-Aware Tabletop Interactions with the TOUCHID Toolkit
Date
2011-07-12T20:07:47Z
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Abstract
Recent work in multi-touch tabletop interaction introduced
many novel techniques that let people manipulate digital
content through touch. Yet most only detect touch blobs.
This ignores richer interactions that would be possible if we
could identify (1) which hand, (2) which part of the hand,
(3) which side of the hand, and (4) which person is actually
touching the surface. Fiduciary-tagged gloves were previously
introduced as a simple but reliable technique for
providing this information. The problem is that its lowlevel
programming model hinders the way developers
could rapidly explore new kinds of user- and handpartaware
interactions. We contribute the TOUCHID toolkit to
solve this problem. It allows rapid prototyping of expressive
multi-touch interactions that exploit the aforementioned
characteristics of touch input. TOUCHID provides an
easy-to-use event-driven API. It also provides higher-level
tools that facilitate development: a glove configurator to
rapidly associate particular glove parts to handparts; and a
posture configurator and gesture configurator for registering
new hand postures and gestures for the toolkit to recognize.
We illustrate TOUCHID’s expressiveness by showing
how we developed a suite of techniques (which we consider
a secondary contribution) that exploits knowledge of
which handpart is touching the surface.
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Keywords
Design, Human Factors