Tiny devices and the 'fat finger' problem
Some researchers say that a logical extension of touch technology is gesture-recognition, by which a system recognizes hand or finger movements across a screen or close to it without requiring an actual touch.
"Our technology is halfway there," IBM's Pinhanez says, "because we recognize the gesture of touching rather than the occlusion of a particular area. You can go over buttons without triggering them."
The occlusion problem, where a finger or hand blocks a user's view of what he's doing and leads him to make mistakes, is being attacked in some novel ways. Microsoft Corp. and Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories collaborated on development of a research prototype called LucidTouch, a two-sided, "pseudo-translucent" mobile device that allows users to issue commands with their fingers on either the front or the back of the device.
"The problem we are addressing is what some people have called the 'fat finger problem,'" says Patrick Baudisch at Microsoft Research. When a user touches the back of the device, he sees an image of his fingers behind instead of in front of the things to be touched on-screen. LucidTouch can accept input from as many as 10 fingers at once.
Baudisch demonstrates a prototype LucidTouch device.
LucidTouch is particularly useful in two situations, Baudisch says: when multi-touch interaction is desired, and when a touch screen is very small, perhaps as small as a watch face. He declined to say when or if LucidTouch might become a product, saying researchers would continue to perfect it while looking for applications such as mobile gaming, art and spreadsheets. Asked about an extension of LucidTouch from touch to gesture recognition, Baudisch says the Microsoft prototypes already can act on finger gestures, with the system recognizing finger motions as well as positions and understanding the meaning of different numbers of fingers. For example, the motion of one finger is seen as equivalent to a mouse movement, a finger touch is interpreted as a click, and two fingers touching and moving is seen as a scroll command. Touch technology in its many variations is an idea whose time has come, Baudisch says. "It's been around a long time, but traditionally in niche markets. The technology was more expensive, and there were ergonomic problems," he says. "But it's all kind of coming together right now." The rise of mobile devices is a big catalyst, he says, with the devices getting smaller and their screens bigger. When a screen covers the entire device, there is no room for conventional buttons, he points out. And that will give impetus to other types of interaction, such as voice, he says.
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Touch as art
Bukvic works with "interactive multimedia art," which can combine animation, video, recorded and on-the-fly electronic music and other things in ways that enable the artist, the audience and the computer to work together in a "symbiotic circle," he says. The user can make an artistic presentation by controlling dozens of parameters -- video brightness, virtual camera position, sound pitch and amplitude, mix of instruments and so on -- with all 10 fingers, much as a pianist plays a complex piece while improvising on it. The parameters can be saved for later recreation of the performance in a "library of possible outcomes," Bukvic says. "It's like virtual Play-Doh, where each [finger] inflection affects the actual output -- aural, visual, etc. The composition and the performance become one."
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