Eric Lecolinet

TapTap and MagStick: improving one-handed target acquisition on small touch-screens

We present the design and evaluation of TapTap and MagStick, two thumb interaction techniques for target acquisition on mobile devices with small touch-screens. These two techniques address all the issues raised by the selection of targets with the thumb on small tactile screens: screen accessibility, visual occlusion and accuracy. A controlled experiment shows that TapTap and MagStick allow the selection of targets in all areas of the screen in a fast and accurate way. They were found to be faster than four previous techniques except Direct Touch which, although faster, is too error prone. They also provided the best error rate of all tested techniques. Finally the paper also provides a comprehensive study of various techniques for thumb based touch-screen target selection.

Control menus: excecution and control in a single interactor

We propose a new type of contextual pop-up menu called a control menu. These menus combine the selection of an operation and the control of this operation. They integrate up to two scroll bars or spin-boxes and thus allow users to keep their attention focused on the menu during the operation. Control menus can have sub-menus, and also retain the novice and expert modes of use found in marking menus. We describe control menus and how they are useful in different types of user interfaces. A program incorporating our control menus can be tested at http://www.infobiogen.fr/services/zomit/.

Clutch-free panning and integrated pan-zoom control on touch-sensitive surfaces: the cyclostar approach

This paper introduces two novel navigation techniques, CycloPan, for clutch-free 2D panning and browsing, and CycloZoom+, for integrated 2D panning and zooming. These techniques instantiate a more generic concept which we call Cyclo* (CycloStar). The basic idea is that users can exert closed-loop control over several continuous variables by voluntarily modulating the parameters of a sustained oscillation. Touch-sensitive surfaces tend to offer impoverished input resources. Cyclo* techniques seem particularly promising on these surfaces because oscillations have multiple geometrical and kinematic parameters many of which may be used as controls. While CycloPan and CycloZoom+ are compatible with each other and with much of the state of the art, our experimental evaluations suggest that these two novel techniques outperform flicking and rubbing techniques.

Watchit: simple gestures and eyes-free interaction for wristwatches and bracelets

We present WatchIt, a prototype device that extends interaction beyond the watch surface to the wristband, and two interaction techniques for command selection and execution. Because the small screen of wristwatch computers suffers from visual occlusion and the fat finger problem, we investigated the use of the wristband as an available interaction resource. Not only does WatchIt use a cheap, energy efficient and invisible technology, but it involves simple, basic gestures that allow good performance after little training, as suggested by the results of a pilot study. We propose a novel gesture technique and an adaptation of an existing menu technique suitable for wristband interaction. In a user study, we investigated their usage in eyes-free contexts, finding that they perform well. Finally, we present techniques where the bracelet is used in addition to the screen to provide precise continuous control over list scrolling. We also report on a preliminary survey of traditional and digital jewelry that points to the high frequency of watches and bracelets in both genders and gives a sense of the tasks people feel like performing on such devices.

MicroRolls: expanding touch-screen input vocabulary by distinguishing rolls vs. slides of the thumb

The input vocabulary for touch-screen interaction on handhelds is dramatically limited, especially when the thumb must be used. To enrich that vocabulary we propose to discriminate, among thumb gestures, those we call MicroRolls, characterized by zero tangential velocity of the skin relative to the screen surface. Combining four categories of thumb gestures, Drags, Swipes, Rubbings and MicroRolls, with other classification dimensions, we show that at least 16 elemental gestures can be automatically recognized. We also report the results of two experiments showing that the roll vs. slide distinction facilitates thumb input in a realistic copy and paste task, relative to existing interaction techniques.

Automatic reading of cursive scripts using a reading model and perceptual concepts

Abstract. This paper presents a model for reading cursive scripts which has an architecture inspired by the behavior of human reading and perceptual concepts. The scope of this study is limited to offline recognition of isolated cursive words. First, this paper describes McClelland and Rumelharts reading model, which formed the basis of the system. The methods behavior is presented, followed by the main original contributions of our model which are: the development of a new technique for baseline extraction, an architecture based on the chosen reading model (hierarchical, parallel, with local representation and interactive activation mechanism), the use of significant perceptual features in word recognition such as ascenders and descenders, the creation of a fuzzy position concept dealing with the uncertainty of the location of features and letters, and the adaptability of the model to words of different lengths and languages. After a description of our model, new results are presented.

Flower menus: a new type of marking menu with large menu breadth, within groups and efficient expert mode memorization

This paper presents Flower menu, a new type of Marking menu that does not only support straight, but also curved gestures for any of the 8 usual orientations. Flower menus make it possible to put many commands at each menu level and thus to create as large a hierarchy as needed for common applications. Indeed our informal analysis of menu breadth in popular applications shows that a quarter of them have more than 16 items. Flower menus can easily contain 20 items and even more (theoretical maximum of 56 items). Flower menus also support within groups as well as hierarchical groups. They can thus favor breadth organization (within groups) or depth organization (hierarchical groups): as a result, the designers can lay out items in a very flexible way in order to reveal meaningful item groupings. We also investigate the learning performance of the expert mode of Flower menus. A user experiment is presented that compares linear menus (baseline condition), Flower menus and Polygon menus, a variant of Marking menus that supports a breadth of 16 items. Our experiment shows that Flower menus are more efficient than both Polygon and Linear menus for memorizing command activation in expert mode.

Browsing Zoomable Treemaps: Structure-Aware Multi-Scale Navigation Techniques

Treemaps provide an interesting solution for representing hierarchical data. However, most studies have mainly focused on layout algorithms and paid limited attention to the interaction with treemaps. This makes it difficult to explore large data sets and to get access to details, especially to those related to the leaves of the trees. We propose the notion of zoomable treemaps (ZTMs), an hybridization between treemaps and zoomable user interfaces that facilitates the navigation in large hierarchical data sets. By providing a consistent set of interaction techniques, ZTMs make it possible for users to browse through very large data sets (e.g., 700,000 nodes dispatched amongst 13 levels). These techniques use the structure of the displayed data to guide the interaction and provide a way to improve interactive navigation in treemaps.

Finger-count & radial-stroke shortcuts: 2 techniques for augmenting linear menus on multi-touch surfaces

We propose Radial-Stroke and Finger-Count Shortcuts, two techniques aimed at augmenting the menubar on multi-touch surfaces. We designed these multi-finger two-handed interaction techniques in an attempt to overcome the limitations of direct pointing on interactive surfaces, while maintaining compatibility with traditional interaction techniques. While Radial-Stroke Shortcuts exploit the well-known advantages of Radial Strokes, Finger-Count Shortcuts exploit multi-touch by simply counting the number of fingers of each hand in contact with the surface. We report the results of an experimental evaluation of our technique, focusing on expert-mode performance. Finger-Count Shortcuts outperformed Radial-Stroke Shortcuts in terms of both easiness of learning and performance speed.

Comparing free hand menu techniques for distant displays using linear, marking and finger-count menus

Distant displays such as interactive public displays (IPD) or interactive television (ITV) require new interaction techniques as traditional input devices may be limited or missing in these contexts. Free hand interaction, as sensed with computer vision techniques, presents a promising interaction technique. This paper presents the adaptation of three menu techniques for free hand interaction: Linear menu, Marking menu and Finger-Count menu. The first study based on a Wizard-of-Oz protocol focuses on Finger-Counting postures in front of interactive television and public displays. It reveals that participants do not choose the most efficient gestures neither before nor after the experiment. Results are used to develop a Finger-Count recognizer. The second experiment shows that all techniques achieve satisfactory accuracy. It also shows that Finger-Count requires more mental demand than other techniques.