Controlling Widgets with One Power-up Button

Daniel Spelmezan (1, 2) , Caroline Appert (1, 2) , Olivier Chapuis (1, 2) , Emmanuel Pietriga (1, 3)

1 IN-SITU - Situated interaction
2 LRI - Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique
3 Inria Chile

The Power-up Button is a physical button that combines pressure and proximity sensing to enable gestural interaction with one thumb. Combined with a gesture recognizer that takes the hand's anatomy into account, the Power-up Button can recognize six different mid-air gestures performed on the side of a mobile device. This gives it, for instance, enough expressive power to provide full one-handed control of interface widgets displayed on screen. This technology can complement touch input, and can be particularly useful when interacting eyes-free. It also opens up a larger design space for widget organization on screen: the button enables a more compact layout of interface components than what touch input alone would allow. This can be useful when, e.g., filling the numerous fields of a long Web form, or for very small devices.

Keywords: Mobile device; Proximity input; Pressure input

Domains: Human-Computer Interaction [cs.HC]

Daniel Spelmezan, Caroline Appert, Olivier Chapuis, Emmanuel Pietriga. Controlling Widgets with One Power-up Button. Proceedings of the 26th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Oct 2013, Saint Andrews, United Kingdom. pp.71-74, ⟨10.1145/2501988.2502025⟩. ⟨hal-00864209v2⟩