“Relative Positioning” – A Key Function of Multi-Touch and Multi-Force
A key element of effective gesture input is the ability to navigate the touch surface and activate the touch sensor WITHOUT lifting the finger(s). This multi-force capability has a couple of significant user benefits:
Improved accuracy — Lifting the finger(s) and retouching the touch sensor i no longer required. Without this capability, lifting the finger(s) and retouching the touch sensor can and will cause miss hits especially with standard low resolution touch sensors. Instead, simply applying more pressure with the finger(s) to activate the sensor provides a high level of input accuracy to applications such as gaming and CAD where accuracy is mission critical.
Relative positioning — The touch sensor places controls based on touch locations. The gesture interface is no longer static but becomes intuitive because no matter where you touch the sensor it intuitively ‘knows’ what you are doing. For example, let’s look at an application we are familiar with, key board strokes.
When typing on a keyboard, we rest our fingers on the ‘home row’ and strike keys with our fingers relative to ‘home row’ often without looking at the keyboard. The key locations are fixed while our fingers move relative to the ‘home row’. “Relative positioning” allows the user to touch ANYWHERE on the sensor with eight fingers in line horizontally and intuitively recognize this gesture as keyboard entry. Another example is the number pad. Three fingers down anywhere horizontally and the sensor ‘knows’ this is a number entry.
In a desktop environment one can easily see the benefits of “relative positioning” by eliminating the back and forth from keypad to mouse and back to keyboard. In other words; one finger mouse, three fingers number pad, eight fingers keyboard and so on. These are only a couple of examples of potentially hundreds of defined gesture input scenarios.
Based on customer inquiries, we believe this functionality will become standard in a range of applications including automotive, mobile applications and gaming.
Tags: multi-force, multi-touch, relative positioning, touch sensor, user experience