Understanding and Rejecting Errant Touches on Multi-touch Tablets

• Main Author: SHU, Ke
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2013
• Subjects: errant touch; multi-touch tablet; Bezel-focus rejection; errant touch pattern; Computer Sciences; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/etd_coll/95; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1089&context=etd_coll
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Given the pervasion of multi-touch tablet, pen-based applications have rapidly moved onto this new platform. Users draw both with bare fingers and using capacitive pens as they would do on paper in the past. Unlike paper, these tablets cannot distinguish legitimate finger/pen input from accidental touches by other parts of the user’s hand. In this thesis, we refer it to as errant touch rejection problem since users may unintentionally touch the screen with other parts of their hand. In this thesis, I design, implement and evaluate new approaches, bezel-focus rejection, of preventing errant touches on multi-touch tablets. I began the research by conducting a formal study to collect and characterize errant touches. I analyzed the data collected from the study and the results are guiding me to design rejection techniques. I will conclude this research by developing bezel-focus rejection and evaluate its performance. The results show that bezel-focus rejection yields high rejection rate of errant touches and make users more inclined to rest hands on tablet than comparison techniques. This research has two major contributions to Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community. First, my proposed errant touch rejection approaches can be applied the other pen-based note-taking applications. Second, my experimental results can serve as a guide to other developing similar techniques.