ForceClicks

Validation level: 5. CHI, UIST, CSCW and TOCHI paper publication

ForceClicks is a novel touch button input technique for consecutive clicking which incorporates touch force sensors. From force data of a single continuous touch over time, ForceClicks detects peaks and generates discrete clicks. Compared to typical button interaction, this is effective in a sense that consecutive clicks do not require finger positional movements.

Touch screen force touch 3D touch Gesture
Publications
Copy Bibtex Yong, S.; Lee, E. J.; Peiris, R.; Chan, L. and Nam, J. ForceClicks: Enabling Efficient Button Interaction with Single Finger Touch. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, pages 489-493, ACM, New York, NY, USA, TEI '17 , 2017.
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Storyboard of Functions

Difference between ForceClicks and ordinary click. While ordinary clicks require the user to initiate a new touch for every click, ForceClicks can receive consecutive inputs without requiring further finger movement.

Basic Mechanism of ForceClicks.
Here, the ForceClicks algorithm observes the rising and falling slopes on the profile and identifies the peak at which a "click" is triggered. Additionally, ForceClicks also features long press, a mode that is triggered by maintaining constant touch force over a certain amount of time

State Diagram. Each state corresponds to the current force change direction. Idle state occurs when the button is untouched, that is, zero force. Up and down states occur when the first time derivative of force changes sign: the system enters up state when the force begins to increase and down state upon decrease.

Evaluation
For each trial, the participant was instructed to reach a randomly assigned number of clicks (between 8-12) on 1 of 4 buttons displayed on the phone screen with the assigned interface conditions, as shown in Figure 4a. The number of clicks being performed was displayed on the phone screen in vision-on-control con- dition (Figure 4b), and on the remote screen in vision-off- control condition (Figure 4c). In vision-off-control condition, the phone screen turned black after the participants per- formed the first click.
Evaluation
The scattered colors manifest that the variance of position decreases When using ForceClicks. On average, the position variance is doubled when participants use the touch-activating buttons (23.117 to 55.228), and the vision does not affect the position accuracy (40.315 to 38.030). On the other hand, the time consumption of both conditions are similar (0.189 to 0.173).
Highlights:
  • Rapid clicking while gaming
  • Reduce of visual dedication allows easier control of external devices
  • Enabling the touching fingertip to rest on the button during consecutive clicks offer two benefits:
    a) less scattering and b) less fatigue.
Limitations:
  • Need to be focus on applying the relevant pressure