Modeling Movement Times and Success Rates for Acquisition of One-dimensional Targets with Uncertain Touchable Sizes

In touch interfaces, a target, such as an icon, has two widths: the visual width and the touchable width. The visual width is the target's appearance, and the touchable width is the area in which users can touch a target and execute an action. In this study, we conduct two experiments to investigate the effects of the visual and touchable widths on touch pointing performance (movement time and success rate). Based on the results, we build candidate models for predicting the movement time and compare them by the values of adjusted R^2 and AIC. In addition, we build a success rate model and test it through cross-validation. Existing models can be applied only to situations where the visual and touchable widths are equal, and we show that our refined model achieves better model fitness, even when such widths are different. We also discuss the design implications of the touch interfaces based on our models.

Digital touch for remote personal communication: An emergent sociotechnical imaginary

This article makes legible emergent social imaginaries of digital touch for remote communication in personal relationships, with attention to digital touch interfaces. It draws on data from rapid prototyping research workshops with apprentice professionals embedded within digital communication. Touch is discussed with respect to four analytical themes: materiality, body, emplacement and temporality. We illustrate how participants’ past and present experiences and future visions of remote digital touch thread through these themes and weave together to form a hegemonic, emergent sociotechnical imaginary of digital touch. The article contributes to social debates within digital personal remote communication by foregrounding touch, the material and the sensorial. The article’s novel interdisciplinary framework (combining design-based rapid prototyping with a multimodal and multi-sensorial analysis within the frame of the sociotechnical imaginary) also contributes to methodology around future-facing phenomena, prior to the process of their solidification into material, political formations.

Functional-Material-Based Touch Interfaces for Multidimensional Sensing for Interactive Displays: A Review

Multidimensional sensing is a highly desired attribute for allowing human-machine interfaces (HMIs) to perceive various types of information from both users and the environment, thus enabling the advancement of various smart electronics/applications, e.g., smartphones and smart cities. Conventional multidimensional sensing is achieved through the integration of multiple discrete sensors, which introduces issues such as high energy consumption and high circuit complexity. These disadvantages have motivated the widespread use of functional materials for detecting various stimuli at low cost with low power requirements. This work presents an overview of simply structured touch interfaces for multidimensional (x-y location, force and temperature) sensing enabled by piezoelectric, piezoresistive, triboelectric, pyroelectric and thermoelectric materials. For each technology, the mechanism of operation, state-of-the-art designs, merits, and drawbacks are investigated. At the end of the article, the author discusses the challenges limiting the successful applications of functional materials in commercial touch interfaces and corresponding development trends.

Defining Stable Touch Area Based on a Large-Screen Smart Device in 3D-Touch Interface

<p><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Gulim; font-size: medium;">Touch interface technologies for mobile devices are essentially in use. The purpose of such touch interfaces is to run an application by touching a screen with a user’s finger or to implement various functions on the device. When the user has an attempt to use the touch interface, users tend to grab the mobile device with one hand. Because of the existence of untouchable areas to which the user cannot reach with the user’s fingers, it is possible to occur for a case where the user is not able to touch a specific area on the screen accurately. This results in some issues that the mobile device does not carry out the user’s desired function and the execution time is delayed due to the wrong implementation. Therefore, there is a need to distinguish the area where the user can stably input the touch interface from the area where the users cannot and to overcome the problems of the unstable touch area. Furthermore, when the size of the screen increases, these issues will become more serious because of an increase in the unstable touch areas. Especially, an interface that receives position and force data like 3D-touch requires the stable area setting different from the conventional 2D-touch. In this paper, we search and analyze the stable touch areas on the large screen where the user can do 3D-touch inputs.</span></span></p>