The mouse wheel may induce physical fatigue by requiring users to clutch the wheel repeatedly when scrolling long distances. To address this problem, some mouse products provide a free-spinning mode in which users can spin the wheel to initiate inertial scrolling. However, the time and effort required to toggle the free-spinning mode may lower the usability of the mouse wheel. To enable inertial scrolling without the overhead of mode switching, we present TouchWheel, a physical mouse wheel with touch sensitivity and a virtual wheel model that enables users to perform flick-and-stop operations as they do on touchscreens. A user experiment revealed that participants could actively use TouchWheel’s flick-and-stop operation according to their different scrolling needs. For tasks that frequently required long-distance scrolling, TouchWheel outperformed a normal mouse wheel in task completion time and required fewer clutching and mode-switching actions than the normal mouse wheel and a spin-enabled mouse wheel. For tasks that required short-distance scrolling, TouchWheel performed similarly to other baseline options.

Users with visual impairments find it difficult to enjoy real-time 2D interactive applications on the touchscreen. Touchscreen applications such as sports games often require simultaneous recognition of and interaction with multiple moving targets through vision. To mitigate this issue, we propose ThroughHand, a novel tactile interaction that enables users with visual impairments to interact with multiple dynamic objects in real time. We designed the ThroughHand interaction to utilize the potential of the human tactile sense that spatially registers both sides of the hand with respect to each other. ThroughHand allows interaction with multiple objects by enabling users to perceive the objects using the palm while providing a touch input space on the back of the same hand. A user study verified that ThroughHand enables users to locate stimuli on the palm with a margin of error of approximately 13 mm and effectively provides a real-time 2D interaction experience for users with visual impairments.

Promisingly, driving is adapting to a Voice User Interface (VUI) that lets drivers utilize diverse applications with little effort. However, the VUI has innate usability issues, such as a turn-taking problem, a short-term memory workload, inefficient controls, and difficulty correcting errors. To overcome these weaknesses, we explored supplementing the VUI with tactile interaction. As an early result, we present the Voice+Tactile interactions that augment the VUI via multi-touch inputs and high-resolution tactile outputs. We designed various Voice+Tactile interactions to support different VUI interaction stages and derived four Voice+Tactile interaction themes: Status Feedback, Input Adjustment, Output Control, and Finger Feedforward. A user study showed that the Voice+Tactile interactions improved the VUI efficiency and its user experiences without incurring significant additional distraction overhead on driving. We hope these early results open new research questions to improve in-vehicle VUI with a tactile channel.

Interaction on the surface usually limited in mechanical movement and does not have surface texture, which results in a lack of haptic feedback. Various techniques have been introduced to supplement this limitation. The main objective of this tutorial is to let the ISS community experience those technologies in hand. By its nature, the haptic interface is hardly explainable with a document, video, and audio. We provide a unique opportunity for the ISS community to feel and experience the wide range of haptic techniques on the surface. In specific, the tutorial will cover the following topics. 1) haptic feedback on a small mobile device 2) Texture rendering on a larger surface 3) An illusion of compliance on a rigid device 4) Pin-array display for information transfer.

As smartwatch functions expand, target selection among many items will probably become a common task. List search interfaces (LSIs) for a smartwatch use a prefix matching query to search for items, and need two modes because of the small screen size: query input mode and list navigation mode. Despite the modes, LSIs may be more efficient than list interfaces (LIs), which involve no text querying, for large pools. Actually, we could show that the LSI outperformed the LI for pool sizes over 60. However, we also found that the LSI users experience overhead when deciding whether to switch the modes or not. To reduce the overhead, we designed two auto-switching LSIs: input-length-based auto-switching LSI (IA-LSI) and list-size-based auto-switching LSI (LA-LSI). We could show both auto-switching LSIs outperformed the conventional LSI for pool sizes over 60. We also conducted experiments with the auto-switching LSIs for various pool sizes, and provided their results and guidelines for the optimal switching criteria for the LSIs.

We explored new interaction scenarios that can be realized when a touchpad outputs fast and high-resolution spatio-temporal tactile patterns to the touch-sensitive skin on the fingertips of a user. We first constructed a special tactile multi-touch touchpad called PinPad, which was capable of outputting fast and high-resolution tactile patterns using a 40 x 25 array of actuated pins. We then developed various interaction scenarios that could be realized using the prototype: 1) Tactile Target, 2) Guide and Constraint, 3) Multi-finger Output, and 4) Dynamic Partition. To evaluate the PinPad scenarios, we implemented demo applications, and conducted interviews with users to collect feedback about their experiences with PinPad and the PinPad scenarios. The participants confirmed the effectiveness of spatio-temporal outputs of PinPad in the scenarios. In particular, they provided diverse feedback regarding the unique tactile experiences of the fast and high-resolution outputs of PinPad.