Human-Computer Interaction with a Different Touch

Talk by Hans Gellersen
December 15th, 15:15, Room BC410

Touch input and two-handed interaction were intensively studied in the mid 80’s but it’s taken 20 years for these ideas to emerge in the mainstream, with the advent of multi-touch interfaces. In this talk we consider touch a little differently, in three examples. The first interface we look at are routine notebooks: in survey work we have found that two thirds of users use an external mouse for notebook interaction which prompts us to consider the built-in touch pad as a free agent, to add a second pointer for two-handed input, or to support complementary input. The second example is a keyboard that we have augmented with touch sensing to obtain three-state input, and with dynamic on-key display, to enable a hybrid keyboard - one that feels like a physical keyboard and has all the flexibility of a soft touch keyboard. The third interface we discuss embraces touch for mobile phone interaction with interactive surfaces, using phones for fluid stylus-like input that is fused with multi-touch on the surface.

Hans Gellersen is a Professor of Interactive Systems in the School of Computing and at Lancaster University, UK. His research interest is in sensors and devices for ubiquitous computing and augmentation of everyday objects and activities, and in user interface technologies. He is closely involved with the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp), which he founded in 1999, and serves on the Editorial Board of IEEE Pervasive Computing. Hans has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.