Force feedback has not been fully explored in modern gaming environments where a gamepad is the main interface. We developed various game interaction scenarios where force feedback through the thumbstick of the gamepad can be effective, and categorized them into five themes. We built a haptic device and control system that can support all presented interactions. The resulting device, FS-Pad, has sufficient fidelity to be used as a haptic game interaction design tool. To verify the presented interactions and effectiveness of the FS-Pad, we conducted a user study with game players, developers, and designers. The subjects used an FS-Pad while playing a demo game and were then interviewed. Their feedback revealed the actual needs for the presented interactions as well as insight into the potential design of game interactions when applying FS-Pad.

As an option for remote text entry, the possibility of bimanual text entry was explored using a touchpad that is called two-thumb touchpad typing (4-T). The design of a 4-T interface presents a few important design options to examine, and one of them is a target selection method. In this study, two 4-T interfaces were designed, called SlideType and FlyType. These interfaces use two different target selection methods, slide-and-click and fly-and-touch, respectively, and their prototypes were implemented using an optical hover-tracking touchpad. An experiment with the prototypes showed that FlyType was faster than SlideType and could achieve a text entry speed over 24 words per minute after practicing 2 hr. In addition, a microanalysis of thumb movements during the experiment showed that there are clear quantitative differences between the two methods in the degree of ballisticity of finger motions, in the concurrency of the movements of the two thumbs, and in the degree of integration between reaching and selecting actions, and that FlyType supports a more integral, ballistic, and concurrent motor skill than SlideType.

Two-finger operations, such as rotation operations and zoom operations, are now standard touchscreen operations. However, these two-finger operations may pose an ergonomic problem when they are performed with one hand. FingerSkate is an interaction technique to mitigate the ergonomic problem of two-finger operations adopting the concept of gesture relaxation. A preliminary study showed that the FingerSkate technique was accepted well by the participants. In particular, a micro-analysis of finger movements during the study showed that FingerSkate was utilized well for large rotations. In a subsequent user study, the effects of two FingerSkate design options, Concurrency and Pivot, were examined. The Concurrency option had a statistically significant effect on performance and task workload for a docking task. The Pivot option had a statistically significant effect on task workload for a puzzle task. More participants preferred the sequential Concurrency option, and most participants preferred the center-of-object Pivot option.

A physical keyboard key has three states, whereas a touch screen usually has only two. Due to this difference, the state corresponding to the touched state of a physical key is missing in a touch screen keyboard. This touched state is an important factor in the usability of a keyboard. In order to recover the role of a touched state in a touch screen, we propose the TapBoard, a touch screen software keyboard that regards tapping actions as keystrokes and other touches as the touched state. In a series of user studies, we validate the effectiveness of the TapBoard concept. First, we show that tapping to type is in fact compatible with the existing typing skill of most touch screen keyboard users. Second, users quickly adapt to the TapBoard and learn to rest their fingers in the touched state. Finally, we confirm by a controlled experiment that there is no difference in text-entry performance between the TapBoard and a traditional touch screen software keyboard. In addition to these experimental results, we demonstrate a few new interaction techniques that will be made possible by the TapBoard.