Paper Reading #12 - Detecting and leveraging finger orientation for interaction with direct-touch surfaces

Comments
Bain Mullins

Aaron Kirkes


Reference Information
Feng Wang, Xiang Cao, Xiangshi Ren, Pourang Irani, UIST’09, October 4–7, 2009, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Summary
This article continues similarly to my previous paper in that it is on the touch input of multi-touch screens of the emerging tablet market. The authors of this article are trying to show the benefits that come from easily determining the orientation of the user's finger direction and how it can be used as another type of input. This could be very helpful as humans use this kind of mentality all the time to point at objects or move them in this manner. In a game such as pool, the orientation could be used in order to easily aim the pool cue. Any sort of aiming would become much easier and more accurate. The algorithm for determining the actual orientation of the finger is quite simple in thinking, but harder to actually implement. When placing the finger down on the touch surface, the user will almost always place the tip of their finger first and then rock their finger back a little. So the pressure can be recorded and therefore determine which way the finger is being placed. Testing was done with a handful of subjects and showed positive results with minimal error.

Discussion
These types of articles are always very important to the future innovation of this area of technology. The touch screen input boon is still relatively new that there is much need for improvement to take over the mouse's territory. Currently, multi-touch is very primitive in that it is simply just tracking a handful of points on the screen in a fairly imprecise fashion. Orientation could open up a whole new area of menus and widgets that could be used. The menus would be semi-circles around a finger and the user would merely point to the relevant option.