U.S. Patent Application No. 13/328,549

Oscar Kin-Chung Au¹     Chiew-Lan Tai² 

Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group of Australia on Computer-Human Interaction (OZCHI 2010)
November 22-26, 2010, Brisbane, Australia, ACM Press.

1 City University of Hong Kong
2 Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Abstract

We present a simple finger registration technique that can distinguish in real-time which hand and fingers of the user are touching the touchscreen. The finger registration process is activated whenever the user places a hand, in any orientation, anywhere on the touchscreen. Such a finger registration technique enables the design of intuitive multitouch interfaces that directly map different combinations of the user’s fingers to the interface operations. In this paper, we first study the effectiveness and robustness of the finger registration process. We then demonstrate the usability of our finger registration method for two new interfaces. Specifically, we describe the Palm Menu, which is an intuitive dynamic menu interface that minimizes hand and eye movement during operations, and a virtual mouse interface that enables user to perform mouse operations in multitouch environment. We conducted controlled experiments to compare the performance of the Palm Menu against common command selection interfaces and the virtual mouse against traditional pointing devices.

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