Lynn Marentette has just reported, hot off the press from Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group at UIST 2009.
MS presents novel input devices that combine the standard capabilities of a computer mouse with multi-touch sensing. The goal is to make multi-touch interaction more widely available and applicable to the desktop environment. To chart the design space, they present five different multi-touch mouse implementations. Each explores a different touch sensing strategy, which leads to differing form-factors and hence interactive possibilities.
The following video is courtesy of Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group:
Music: “Motion Blur”, by Bjorn Hartman. The researchers on the team: Nicolas Villar, Shahram Izadi, Dan Rosenfeld, Hrvoje Benko, John Helmes, Jonathan Westhues, Steve Hodges, Eyal Ofek, Alex Butler, Xiang Cao and Billy Chen.
“With the emergence of multi-touch, we now have the opportunity to manipulate digital content with increased dexterity. But whilst multi-touch has been incorporated into many different form-factors – from tabletop to mobile phone – it has yet to find a place on our desktops. This may seem surprising, particularly given that for many computing tasks the desktop setting still dominates.”
MS explore the possibilities for bringing the benefits of multi-touch interaction to a traditional desktop setting, comprising of a computer, vertical display, key-=board and mouse. They refer to these novel input devices as multi-touch (MT) mice. In addition to serving as devices for common pointer-based interactions, MT mice conceptually allow the user to reach into the GUI – enabling them to manipulate the graphical environment with their fingers, and to execute commands via hand-gestures without the need to physically touch the display.
The paper Mouse 2.0: Multi-touch Meets the Mouse presents a detailed description of hardware and software implementation of prototypes, discusses the relative strengths, limitations and affordance of these novel input devices as informed by the results of a preliminary user study.
Written By: Future-Making Serious Games
Posted By: Situated Research, LLC
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