+********************************************************************** * * * Einladung * * * * Informatik-Oberseminar * * * +**********************************************************************

Zeit: Mittwoch, 26. Juni 2024, 13:00 Uhr Ort: Raum 9222, E3, Informatikzentrum

Referent: Dr. Simon Völker Lehrstuhl Informatik 10, Studiencenter Informatik

Thema: Beyond Touch: Enriching the Interaction with Mobile Devices

Abstract:

Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are now the most common digital tools in daily life, aiding in both work and personal tasks. Much of their success stems from their intuitive touchscreen interaction, which allows users to engage with any digital content by simply touching the screen.

However, despite their success, touch input has several limitations and drawbacks. It reduces the extensive input capabilities of our hands to mostly a single touchpoint on a 2D surface, lacking additional information such as the force or orientation of the touch, or extra keys like the multiple modifier buttons found on a mouse or keyboard. These limitations slow down interaction and present numerous challenges, negatively affecting usability. Additional issues such as the fat-finger problem and limited reachability further add to the inconveniences. While the input capabilities are sufficient for simple applications, more complex tasks requiring intensive or intricate input, such as large-scale text editing, are still cumbersome and often avoided.

In this thesis, I aim to present several approaches that explore, design, prototype, and analyze new techniques to enrich and expand the limited interaction methods on mobile devices. The goal is to empower users to utilize their movement and sensing capabilities in a more meaningful way, beyond simply creating basic touch input on a sheet of glass. I achieve this by focusing on three approaches: 1) Improving touch input on the device itself by incorporating additional properties of the user's hand, such as the force of a touchpoint. I utilize this additional input dimension to create new interaction techniques and to address existing issues, such as the reachability on a device or the lack of shortcuts on touchscreens. 2) Combining touch with other input methods, such as the user's head or eye movements, to overcome the inherent limitations of touch input. 3) Utilizing the sensing capabilities of mobile devices to detect their surroundings to enable other objects around the device to serve as additional input devices that enable new use cases for mobile devices.

My habilitation thesis thus contributes a series of new interaction techniques, implemented and evaluated in lab experiments and user studies, that use touch force sensing, head and gaze input, and objects in the surrounding environment, to make mobile touch input more expressive and effective.

Es laden ein: die Dozentinnen und Dozenten der Informatik