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Back-of-device interaction allows creating very small touch devices

Published: 04 April 2009 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we explore how to add pointing input capabilities to very small screen devices. On first sight, touchscreens seem to allow for particular compactness, because they integrate input and screen into the same physical space. The opposite is true, however, because the user's fingers occlude contents and prevent precision.
We argue that the key to touch-enabling very small devices is to use touch on the device backside. In order to study this, we have created a 2.4" prototype device; we simulate screens smaller than that by masking the screen. We present a user study in which participants completed a pointing task successfully across display sizes when using a back-of device interface. The touchscreen-based control condition (enhanced with the shift technique), in contrast, failed for screen diagonals below 1 inch. We present four form factor concepts based on back-of-device interaction and provide design guidelines extracted from a second user study.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '09: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2009
2426 pages
ISBN:9781605582467
DOI:10.1145/1518701
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 04 April 2009

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Author Tags

  1. back-of-device interaction
  2. input devices
  3. lucidtouch
  4. mobile devices
  5. nanotouch
  6. pointing
  7. touch

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CHI '09 Paper Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,130 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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