Title

Augmenting touch expressivity to improve the touch modality

Abstract

During the last decades, touch surfaces have become more and more ubiquitous. Whether on tablets, on smartphones or on laptops, touch surfaces are used by a majority of us on a daily basis. However, the limited expressivity – the different channels used to convey information to the system – of the touch modality restricts drastically the amount of features that can be controlled via touch only. For instance, a typical smartphone touchscreen only provides the absolute position of a contact on the screen, thus applications usually offer only one way to carry out tasks (which can augment user frustration or cap performances) or restrict possibilities (e.g. Photoshop on desktop offers more than 600 commands but only about 40 on smartphones and tablets). In this talk, I will present an overview of my on-going research and discuss different ways to tackle this problem, augment touch expressivity and user efficiency: from tools that helps better designing touch interfaces to the use of new input dimensions in original interaction techniques.

Speaker biography

Alix Goguey is a post postdoctoral fellow working with Carl Gutwin in the Interaction Lab at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in October 2016 in the Mjolnir research group at Inria Lille – Nord Europe, France, under the supervision of Géry Casiez. His work focuses on understanding and designing interaction techniques on touch input devices and particularly through the use of new information such as finger identification. To learn more about Alix’s work: www.alixgoguey.fr