Telekinetic Thumb Summons Out-of-reach Touch Interface Beneath Your Thumbtip (demo)

Abstract

As personal interactive devices become more ingrained into our daily lives, it becomes more important to understand how seamless interaction with those devices can be fostered. A typical mechanism to interface with a personal device is via a touch screen, in which users use their fingertip or stylus to scroll, type, select, or otherwise control device usage. Touch-based techniques, however, can become restrictive or inconvenient under a variety of scenarios. For example, personal devices such as phones or tablets are continuously increasing in size, making one-handed interaction difficult because one cannot easily hold the phone and touch the screen (with the thumb) at the same time with one hand. Therefore, in this demo, we present a new technique to interact with personal devices in which the screen and touch screen interactions can adapt to a user's grip or current touch constraints.