Designing rich touch interaction through proximity and 2.5D force sensing touchpad

Abstract

The touchpad is the de facto standard input device for controlling the GUI on portable computers. Most touchpads detect only finger contact and ignores other physical actions, such as applying force or hovering over the device. In this paper, we introduce a novel touchpad capable of tracking finger hover and measuring normal and shear forces. We also present two design strategies for the hover- and force-enhanced touchpad: multi-level user interaction and mimicry of physical manipulation. We illustrate the two design strategies using two applications that we developed based on the design strategies.