Force gestures: augmenting touch screen gestures with normal and tangential forces

Abstract

Force gestures are touch screen gestures augmented by the normal and tangential forces on the screen. In order to study the feasibility of the force gestures on a mobile touch screen, we implemented a prototype touch screen device that can sense the normal and tangential forces of a touch gesture on the screen. We also designed two example applications, a web browser and an e-book reader, that utilize the force gestures for their primary actions. We conducted a user study with the prototype and the applications to study the characteristics of the force gestures and the effectiveness of their mapping to the primary actions. In the user study we could also discover interesting usability issues and collect useful user feedback about the force gestures and their mapping to GUI actions.