Touch input is the universal approach for communicating intention to interactive computing systems. However, touchscreens are flat, solid surfaces that fail to reproduce the qualities of real-world object interaction (e.g. deformation, stiffness, springiness). Further, their expressivity is fundamentally bounded by a single measurable dimension: contact with a solid, touch-sensitive surface. This project will radically increase the expressivity of touchscreen-based interaction by co-locating three force modalities into a single visual display surface (force input, resistive- and kinetic- force feedback). This project will create a new paradigm for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI): Force Responsive Deformable User Interfaces (FRUI). FRUIs will allow users to ‘push through’ a display and for the display to ‘push back’.
If successful, this project has the potential for significant impact on society. FRUIs support ‘eyes free’ interaction, allowing users to exploit their sense of touch to mute a phone call or acknowledge a message while their phone is in their pocket. Equally, they provide a tactile channel for visually-impaired users to consume typically visual-only content. They also facilitate a full gamut of expressive input gestures that can be transmitted and reproduced to show affection or distaste to a social media post or used as input to graphical drawing tool.
The work in this project is broken into four core themes/objectives:
• Develop engineering approaches for integrating multi-point deformable force input, resistive force feedback, and kinetic force feedback into a single display surface.
• Empirically characterise and model fundamental user behaviour with deformable force-responsive user interfaces.
• Design conceptual models of interaction for deformable force-responsive user interfaces.
• Evaluate interaction techniques that exploit the expressive power of deformable force-responsive interfaces.
