Communications of the ACM
Carnegie Mellon Group Shows Ipad Skeuomorphism
TouchTools is a gesture design approach aimed at making software more natural to use by allowing users to manipulate tools on the screen just as they would in real life.
Credit: Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed TouchTools, a gesture design approach that enables users to manipulate tools on the screen just as they would in real life, with the goal of making software more natural to use.
"The core idea behind TouchTools is to draw upon user familiarity and motor skill with tools from the real world, and bring them to interactive use on computers," says Carnegie Mellon University professor Chris Harrison.
TouchTools enables users to replicate a tool's corresponding real-world grasp and press it to the screen as though it was physically present. The system recognizes this motion and instantiates the virtual tool as if it was being grasped in that position.
"We propose that touch gesture design be inspired by the manipulation of physical tools from the real world," Harrison says. "In this way, we can leverage user familiarity and fluency with such tools to build a rich set of gestures for touch interaction."
During testing, the researchers found that with only a few minutes of training on a proof-of-concept system, users were able to summon a variety of virtual tools by replicating their corresponding real-world grasps.
The team presented their research at the recent ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Toronto.
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