Touchscreen

Since the rise of radio and television, we have lived in an era defined increasingly by the electronic circulation of images and sounds. But the flood of new computing technologies known as haptic interfaces—which use electricity, vibration, and force feedback to stimulate the sense of touch—are promising to change this situation, offering an alternative way of mediating and experiencing reality.

In Archaeologies of Touch, David Parisi offers the first full history of these increasingly vital technologies, showing how the efforts of scientists and engineers over the past 300 years have gradually remade and redefined our sense of touch. Through lively analyses of electrical machines, videogames, sex toys, sensory substitution systems, robotics, and human-computer interfaces, Parisi shows how the materiality of touch technologies has been shaped by attempts to transform humans into more efficient processors of information.

With haptics becoming ever more central to emerging virtual reality platforms (immersive bodysuits loaded with touch stimulating actuators), wearable computers (haptic messaging systems like the Apple Watch’s Taptic Engine), and smartphones (vibrations that emulate the feel of buttons and onscreen objects), Archaeologies of Touch offers a timely and provocative engagement with the long history of touch technology that helps us confront and question the power relations of giving touch its own set of technical media.

Background: Dementia can have significant detrimental impacts on the well-being of those with the disease and their carers. A range of computer-based interventions, including touchscreen-based interventions have been researched for use with this population in the hope that they might improve psychological well-being. This article reviews touchscreen-based interventions designed to be used by people with dementia (PWD), with a specific focus in assessing their impact on well-being.

In this paper, I introduce Sfard's discursive framework to examine secondary-school calculus students' communication during exploratory activities mediated by the use of touchscreen dynamic geometry environments (DGEs). Six pairs of secondary-school students participated in an open-ended task to explore calculus relationships using touchscreen-DGEs. Qualitative data capturing the students' linguistic communication (speech) and hand movements (gestures and dragging) were analysed when the students interacted with the touchscreen-DGEs used during the task. Findings suggest that new forms of communication were mobilised through the act of dragging on a touchscreen-DGE. In particular, routines for comparing, reasoning, conjecturing and verifying emerged within the use of the haptic DGE interface. In this paper, potentials of the touchscreen-DGEs in facilitating new forms of gestural thinking , as well as theoretical and methodological considerations that recognise the changing ways in which the hand and media interact, are discussed.

Figure 1. GazeForm concept. Left: when eye-hand coordination exists for touch modality the surface is flat. Right: when the gaze is solicited by another task the surface offers a salient tangible control allowing continuity of manipulation and freeing the gaze. ABSTRACT An increasing number of domains, including aeronautics, are adopting touchscreens. However, several drawbacks limit their operational use, in particular, eyes-free interaction is almost impossible making it difficult to perform other tasks simultaneously. We introduce GazeForm, an adaptive touch interface with shape-changing capacity that offers an adapted interaction modality according to gaze direction. When the user's eyes are focused on interaction, the surface is flat and the system acts as a touchscreen. When eyes are directed towards another area, physical knobs emerge from the surface. Compared to a touch only mode, experimental results showed that GazeForm generated a lower subjective mental workload and a higher efficiency of execution (20% faster). Furthermore, GazeForm required less visual attention and participants were able to concentrate more on a secondary monitoring task. Complementary interviews with pilots led us to explore timings and levels of control for using gaze to adapt modality.

The latency of current mobile devices' touchscreens is around 100ms and has widely been explored. Latency down to 2ms is noticeable, and latency as low as 25ms reduces users' performance. Previous work reduced touch latency by extrapolating a finger's movement using an ensemble of shallow neural networks and showed that predicting 33ms into the future increases users' performance. Unfortunately, this prediction has a high error. Predicting beyond 33ms did not increase participants' performance, and the error affected the subjective assessment. We use more recent machine learning techniques to reduce the prediction error. We train LSTM networks and multilayer perceptrons using a large data set and regularization. We show that linear extrapolation causes an 116.7% higher error and the previously proposed ensembles of shallow networks cause a 26.7% higher error compared to the LSTM networks. The trained models, the data used for testing, and the source code is available on GitHub.

This paper details a preliminary evaluation into the usability and universal design of force touch interaction with older users as recently introduced into the Apple iOS9 operating system. The evaluation involved a small group of older users and two typical smartphone tasks. The tasks involved increasing font size and rotating an image on an Apple iPhone with iOS9 installed. The study recorded task times and semi-structured interview responses. The overall results indicated that the new force touch feature can gain good acceptance from older users, but that there were some usability and universal design problems with the feature which hampered the potential of full acceptance by older users.

Developments in information and communication technologies have been greatly influential on the practices in all fields, and education is not an exception to this. To illustrate with, computers were first used in computer – assisted education in order to increase the efficiency of teaching process. Recently, computer has contributed more to the field through interactive and smart class applications that are specially designed for classroom use. The aim of this study is to develop a low – cost, portable and projection – supported touchscreen to be used in educational environments by using FPGA technology and to test its usability. For the purposes of the study, the above mentioned system was developed by using the necessary hardware and software, and later it was tested in terms of usability. This usability test was administered to teachers, who were the target end – users of this touchscreen writing / drawing system. The aim of this test was to determine "user – friendliness" , "subservientness" and "usability" of the system. Several tools were used to obtain data from the users that participated in the study. The analysis and evaluation of the data collected revealed that the system has achieved its objectives successfully.

This paper analyses the variations in the identification power among set of four features, namely Signature Precision (SP), Finger Pressure (FP), Movement Time (MT), and Speed that were extracted from finger gesture of touch-screens. The differences across users were studied using the above features individually and combined for the purpose of user identification based on the Euclidean distance and the k-nearest neighbour classifier. The paper investigates the performance variations across users using a dataset of 50 users, and concludes that the discrimination power of different feature is heavily user dependant i.e. while some features achieve 100% identification accuracy for some users, they perform poorly for others. On small smartphone 19% and on mini-tablet 42% of the users have unique FP compared to other features. We concluded that FP could be used alone to perfectly identify users for 100% accuracy.

Open Access (download for free): https://meson.press/books/touchscreen-archaeology/

The touchscreen belongs to a century-long history of hands-on media practices and touchable art objects. This media-archaeological excavation examines the nature of our tactile involvement with media and invites the reader to think about the touchscreen beyond its technological implications. In six chapters, the book questions and historicizes both aspects of the touchscreen: "touch" as a media practice and "screen" as a touchable object. Taking cue from the so-called rube figure of early cinema, it looks at various instances of proper and improper screen touching and discusses the tecnicity of hand gestures, such as thumbing a flipbook, pinching a tablet, and caressing a projection. Finally, it proposes to consider the image-on-screen as a touchable object similar to the touchable surface of the screen itself, for which the notion of "image+" is introduced. Picked up from image processing software, this term refers to today’s screenic image that goes beyond its visual appeal by adding an extra, often tactile or hands-on, dimension (e.g. the image as a hyperlink, as a gateway to something else, as a form of play).

In this exploratory case study, we describe how teacher candidates with minimal mathematics knowledge of spherical geometry construct, discuss, manipulate and share the three-right angled triangle on a sphere using GeoGebra software. The study aims to demonstrate how mathematical understanding can begin with an object construction and manipulation in Dynamic Geometry Environment (DGE). Our ideas emerge from teacher candidates' use of the touchscreen-based computers mounted in a concept classroom following by embedding constructions in Canvas– Learning Management System (LMS), aiming to develop their understanding of spatial ability and spherical geometry. In this paper, we are not focusing on trigonometric laws, or other mathematical properties of the spherical triangle, instead we are introducing the construction of spherical triangle to not mathematics or science major teacher candidates. Some theory and techniques, including angel measurements on the sphere in a dynamic way are also learned along the way. Adapting Arzarello et al.'s (2014) theoretical framework of touch interactions and using Nemirovsky et al.'s (2013) perceptuomotor integration approach, augmented by a focus on the role of the bodily interactions in the mathematical learning with a touchscreen device, we assess and analyse how mathematical learning occurs when learners interact with touchscreen-based technologies and their peers. The result of the study showed that the mathematical construction and manipulation along with touchscreen-based interactions play a crucial role in developing spatial skills, which consequently triggers dynamic forms of mathematical communication. We also present evidence of collaborative engagement where teacher candidates engage in angle measurement of spherical triangles.

Direct touch is the major interaction model of modern mobile touchscreen devices. Although it is praised for its intuitiveness and input speed, its suffers from three major problems, which are inaccessibility, inextensibility, and inaccuracy, due to the limited control space of touch interaction.

In this thesis, we present three contributions, each addressing one of the three major problems:

1. For the problem of inaccessibility, which refers to the inability of interacting in the distant out-of-reach screen area when using one-handed or two-handed thumb interactions, we present BezelCursor. It is a novel one-handed thumb interaction technique that improves screen accessibility in the context of target acquisition. It combines bezel-initiated interaction and pointing gesture to control a screen cursor. Unlike the existing techniques, it requires no explicit mode-switching to invoke and can be smoothly used together with commonly adopted interaction styles such as direct touch and dragging. Our user studies show that BezelCursor requires less grip adjustments, and is more accurate or faster than the state-of-the-art techniques when using a fixed secure grip.

2. For the problem of inextensibility, which refers to the limited number of supported interaction methods, we motivate mobile interface designers to use bezel-initiated gestures for implicit mode-switching to support multiple touch interaction techniques in a limited space by presenting findings of an exploration of the design space of bezel-initiated gestures. It consists of a guessability study, which elicits end-user touch gestures on mobile devices. While previous studies give full freedom to the participants for gesture design, we apply a constraint that gestures must be initiated from the bezel, to ensure they are compatible with the mainstream gestures like dragging and pitching, and are highly detectable. We analyze the consensus among our participants, and reveal a set of user-defined bezel-initiated gestures including a number of novel designs. This serves as an important foundation in designing and customizing bezel-initiated gestures for extending existing interaction techniques.

3. For the problem of inaccuracy, which refers to the offset between user-intended touch position and the system-detected touch position, we present the idea of simultaneous co-refinement of multiple touch paths. We identify that inaccurate touch input is particularly problematic when drawing in a limited control space. It is because the canvas cannot be zoomed in too much or else the user will lose the overview of the drawing. We utilize the co-refinement idea to develop an assistive image tracing system, EZ-Sketching, to automatically refine sketch lines roughly traced over single images  based on the image features being traced. Unlike existing edge snapping methods, which aim at optimizing individual strokes, we show that a co-refinement of multiple nearby strokes results in drawings that are more accurate. Our user studies confirm that the refined sketches show closer resemblance to the traced images and are often aesthetically more pleasing.