Explorations to Enrich Touch Interaction

Biography

Geehyuk Lee is currently an associate professor at School of Computing, KAIST, South Korea. His research interests are interaction devices and techniques for smart information appliances, wearable computers, and smart environments. His primary research focuses include exploration of new interaction possibilities on force-sensing and hover-sensing interactive surfaces and investigation of novel multimodal tactile feedback techniques for interactive surfaces and wearable devices. He recently started a large-scale government-funded HCI project, where he attempts to augment wearable interactions with big data and deep learning.

Abstract

Touch interfaces are now de facto standard user interfaces for smart devices, such as smartphones and smartwatches. We, HCI Lab at KAIST, have been interested in touch interfaces since the introduction of iPhone, and have been exploring ways to enrich the physical interactions on the touch surfaces. In this seminar I give a short overview of our efforts in this exploration so far. In retrospect, I see we pursued three approaches. First, we sought to exploit the unique characteristics of finger skills. For instance, fingers are faster than the mouse and can play more than a double click. Second, we sought new possibilities with force sensing surfaces. For instance, dragging and sliding can be distinguished on a force sensing surface. Third, we explored new possibilities with hover-tracking surfaces. For instance, hover-tracking may combine otherwise discrete gestures into a meaningful action. Currently, we are interested in combining these approaches, e.g., using a force-sensing and hover-tracking surface. Also we are interested in closing the interaction loop of touch interfaces using haptic feedback. I hope to share our current research questions with the audience of this seminar and learn fresh viewpoints through this communication opportunity.