Paper: The “Seen but Unnoticed” Vocabulary of Natural Touch: Revolutionizing Direct Interaction with Our Devices and One Another

In this Vision (for the UIST 2021 Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology), I argue that “touch” input and interaction remains in its infancy when viewed in context of the seen but unnoticed vocabulary of natural human behaviors, activity, and environments that surround direct interaction with displays.

Unlike status-quo touch interaction — a shadowplay of fingers on a single screen — I argue that our perspective of direct interaction should encompass the full rich context of individual use (whether via touch, sensors, or in combination with other modalities), as well as collaborative activity where people are engaged in local (co-located), remote (tele-present), and hybrid work.

We can further view touch through the lens of the “Society of Devices,” where each person’s activities span many complementary, oft-distinct devices that offer the right task affordance (input modality, screen size, aspect ratio, or simply a distinct surface with dedicated purpose) at the right place and time.

While many hints of this vision already exist in the literature, I speculate that a comprehensive program of research to systematically inventory, sense, and design interactions around such human behaviors and activities—and that fully embrace touch as a multi-modal, multi-sensor, multi-user, and multi-device construct—could revolutionize both individual and collaborative interaction with technology.

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For the remote presentation, instead of a normal academic talk, I recruited my friend and colleague Nicolai Marquardt to have a 15-minute conversation with me about the vision and some of its implications:

Watch the “Seen but Unnoticed” UIST 2021 Vision presentation video on YouTube

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Several aspects of this vision paper relate to a larger Microsoft Research project known as SurfaceFleet that explores the distributed systems and user experience implications of a “Society of Devices” in the New Future of Work.

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Ken Hinckley. The “Seen but Unnoticed” Vocabulary of Natural Touch: Revolutionizing Direct Interaction with Our Devices and One Another. UIST Vision presented at The 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’21). Non-archival publication, 5 pages. Virtual Event, USA, Oct 10-14, 2021.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.03958

[PDF] [captioned presentation video – mp4]

Paper: The uncanny valley of haptics

This work explores a rather intriguing sensory illusion that can extend the sense of touch beyond the confines of your own body.

For a highly accessible discussion, please see the Scientific American Observations write-up of our work (“If (Virtual) Reality Feels Almost Right, It’s Exactly Wrong“).

And for a proper scientific write-up and analysis, see our Science Robotics cover article, The uncanny valley of haptics. Note the main article is short (per the format favored by Science) but the supplementary materials go into considerable depth. The full data, materials, and Azure notebook for the analysis are available as well.

nature materials also featured this work (“Zombie Materials“) but alas their article is paywalled.

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Christopher C. Berger, Mar Gonzalez-Franco, Eyal Ofek and Ken Hinckley, The uncanny valley of haptics. Science Robotics, 2018. 3(17).
https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.aar7010

[PDF] [Video on YouTube]

Scientific American Observations: If (Virtual) Reality Feels Almost Right, It’s Exactly Wrong

Scientific American Observations
If (Virtual) Reality Feels Almost Right, It’s Exactly Wrong: How adding touch to VR can lead to an “uncanny valley” of sensations—and what we can do about it.
Mar Gonzalez-Franco, Christopher C Berger, and Ken Hinckley. April 19, 2018.

A general-interest overview of the fascinating sensory illusions revealed by our Science Robotics paper The uncanny valley of haptics.

Book Chapter: Input/Output Devices and Interaction Techniques, Third Edition

Ken Hinckley, Robert J.K. Jacob, R., Colin Ware, Jacob O. Wobbrock, and Daniel Wigdor. Input/Output Devices and Interaction Techniques. Appears as Chapter 21 in The Computing Handbook, Third Edition: Two-Volume Set, ed. by Tucker, A., Gonzalez, T., Topi, H., and Diaz-Herrera, J. Published by Chapman and Hall/CRC (Taylor & Francis), May 13, 2014.  ISBN 9781439898444. [PDF – Author’s Draft – may contain discrepancies]

Symposium Abstract: Issues in bimanual coordination: The props-based interface for neurosurgical visualization

I have a small backlog of updates and new posts to clear out, which I’ll be undertaking in the next few days.

The first of these is the following small abstract that actually dates from way back in 1996, shortly before I graduated with my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Virginia.

It was a really fun symposium organized by the esteemed Yves Guiard, famous for his kinematic chain model of human bimanual action, that included myself and Bill Buxton, among others. For me this was a small but timely recognition that came early in my career and made it possible for me to take the stage alongside two of my biggest research heroes.

Hinckley, K., 140.3: Issues in bimanual coordination: The props-based interface for neurosurgical visualization. Appeared in Symposium 140: Human bimanual specialization: New perspectives on basic research and application, convened by Yves Guiard, Montréal, Quebec, Canada, Aug. 17, 1996. Abstract published in  International Journal of Psychology, Volume 31, Issue 3-4, Special Issue: Abstracts of the XXVI INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF PSYCHOLOGY, 1996. [PDF – Symposium 140 Abstracts]

Abstract

I will describe a three-dimensional human-computer interface for neurosurgical visualization based on the bimanual manipulation of real-world tools. The user’s nonpreferred hand holds a miniature head that can be “sliced open” or “pointed to” using a cross-sectioning plane or a stylus held in the preferred hand. The nonpreferred hand acts as a dynamic frame-of-reference relative to which the preferred hand articulates its motion. I will also discuss experiments that investigate the role of bimanual action in virtual manipulation and in the design of human-computer interfaces in general.

Paper: Toward Compound Navigation Tasks on Mobiles via Spatial Manipulation

I have three papers coming out this week at MobileHCI 2013, the 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, which convenes this week in Munich. It’s one of the great small conferences that focuses exclusively on mobile interaction, which of course is a long-standing interest of mine.

This post focuses on the first of those papers, and right behind it will be short posts on the other two projects that my co-authors are presenting this week.

I’ve explored many directions for viewing and moving through information on small screens, often motivated by novel hardware sensors as well as basic insights about human motor and cognitive capabilities. And I also have a long history in three-dimensional (spatial) interaction, virtual environments, and the like. But despite doing this stuff for decades, every once in a while I still get surprised by experimental results.

That’s just part of what keeps this whole research gig fun and interesting. If the all answers were simple and obvious, there would be no point in doing the studies.

In this particular paper, my co-authors and I took a closer look at a long-standing spatial, or through-the-lens, metaphor for interaction– akin to navigating documents (or other information spaces) by looking through your mobile as if it were a camera viewfinder– and subjected it to experimental scrutiny.

While this basic idea of using your mobile as a viewport onto a larger virtual space has been around for a long time, the idea hasn’t been subjected to careful scrutiny in the context of moving a mobile device’s small screen as a way to view virtually larger documents. And the potential advantages of the approach have not been fully articulated and realized either.

This style of navigation (panning and zooming control) on mobile devices has great promise because it allows you to offload the navigation task itself to your nonpreferred hand, leaving your preferred hand free to do other things like carry bags of grocieries — or perform additional tasks such as annotation, selection, and tapping commands — on top of the resulting views.

But, as our study also shows, it is an approach not without its challenges; sensing the spatial position of the device, and devising an appropriate input mapping, are both difficult challenges that will need more progress to fully take advantage of this way of moving through information on a mobile device. For the time being, at least, the traditional touch gestures of pinch-to-zoom and drag-to-pan still appear to offer the most efficient solution for general-purpose navigation tasks.

Pahud, M., Hinckley, K., Iqbal, S., Sellen, A., and Buxton, B., Toward Compound Navigation Tasks on Mobiles via Spatial Manipulation. In ACM 15th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, (MobileHCI 2013), Munich, Germany, Aug. 27-30, 2013, pp. 113-122. [PDF] [video – MP4]

Toward Compound Navigation on Mobiles via Spatial Manipulation on YouTube

Paper: Gradual Engagement between Digital Devices as a Function of Proximity: From Awareness to Progressive Reveal to Information Transfer

I collaborated on a nifty project with the fine folks from Saul Greenberg’s group at the University of Calgary exploring the emerging possibilities for devices to sense and respond to their digital ecology. When devices have fine-grained sensing of their spatial relationships to one another, as well as to the people in that space, it brings about new ways for users to interact with the resulting system of cooperating devices and displays.

This fine-grained sensing approach makes for an interesting contrast to what Nic Marquardt and I explored in GroupTogether, which intentionally took a more conservative approach towards the sensing infrastructure — with the idea in mind that sometimes, one can still do a lot with very little (sensing).

Taken together, the two papers nicely bracket some possibilities for the future of cross-device interactions and intelligent environments.

This work really underscores that we are still largely in the dark ages with regard to such possibilities for digital ecologies. As new sensors and sensing systems make this kind of rich awareness of the surround of devices and users possible, our devices, operating systems, and user experiences will grow to encompass the expanded horizons of these new possibilities as well.

The full citation and the link to our scientific paper are as follows:

Marquardt, N., Ballendat, T., Boring, S., Greenberg, S. and Hinckley, K., Gradual Engagement between Digital Devices as a Function of Proximity: From Awareness to Progressive Reveal to Information Transfer. In Proceedings of ACM Interactive Tabletops & Surfaces (ITS 2012). Boston, MA, USA, November 11-14. 10pp. [PDF] [video – MP4].

Watch the Gradual Engagement via Proximity video on YouTube

GroupTogether — Exploring the Future of a Society of Devices

My latest paper discussing the GroupTogether system just appeared at the 2012 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology in Cambridge, MA.

GroupTogether video available on YouTube

I’m excited about this work — it really looks hard at what some of the next steps in sensing systems might be, particularly when one starts considering how users can most effectively interact with one another in the context of the rapidly proliferating Society of Devices we are currently witnessing.

I think our paper on the GroupTogether system, in particular, does a really nice job of exploring this with strong theoretical foundations drawn from the sociological literature.

F-formations are the various type of small groups that people form when engaged in a joint activity.

GroupTogether starts by considering the natural small-group behaviors adopted by people who come together to accomplish some joint activity.  These small groups can take a variety of distinctive forms, and are known collectively in the sociological literature as f-formations. Think of those distinctive circles of people that form spontaneously at parties: typically they are limited to a maximum of about 5 people, the orientation of the partipants clearly defines an area inside the group that is distinct from the rest of the environment outside the group, and there are fairly well established social protocols for people entering and leaving the group.

A small group of two users as sensed via GroupTogether’s overhead Kinect depth-cameras.

GroupTogether also senses the subtle orientation cues of how users handle and posture their tablet computers. These cues are known as micro-mobility, a communicative strategy that people often employ with physical paper documents, such as when a sales representative orients a document towards to to direct your attention and indicate that it is your turn to sign, for example.

Our system, then, is the first to put small-group f-formations, sensed via overhead Kinect depth-camera tracking, in play simultaneously with the micro-mobility of slate computers, sensed via embedded accelerometers and gyros.

GroupTogether uses f-formations to give meaning to the micro-mobility of slate computers. It understands which users have come together in a small group, and which users have not. So you can just tilt your tablet towards a couple of friends standing near you to share content, whereas another person who may be nearby but facing the other way — and thus clearly outside of the social circle of the small group — would not be privy to the transaction. Thus, the techniques lower the barriers to sharing information in small-group settings.

Check out the video to see what these techniques look like in action, as well as to see how the system also considers groupings of people close to situated displays such as electronic whiteboards.

The full text of our scientific paper on GroupTogether and the citation is also available.

My co-author Nic Marquardt was the first author and delivered the talk. Saul Greenberg of the University of Calgary also contributed many great insights to the paper.

Image credits: Nic Marquardt

Paper: Cross-Device Interaction via Micro-mobility and F-formations (“GroupTogether”)

Marquardt, N., Hinckley, K., and Greenberg, S., Cross-Device Interaction via Micro-mobility and F-formations.  In ACM UIST 2012 Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’12). ACM, New York, NY, USA,  Cambridge, MA, Oct. 7-10, 2012, pp. (TBA). [PDF] [video – WMV]. Known as the GroupTogether system.

See also my post with some further perspective on the GroupTogether project.

Watch the GroupTogether video on YouTube

Paper: CodeSpace: Touch + Air Gesture Hybrid Interactions for Supporting Developer Meetings

Bragdon, A., DeLine, R., Hinckley, K., and Morris, M. R., Code space: Touch + Air Gesture Hybrid Interactions for Supporting Developer Meetings.  In Proc. ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (ITS ’11). ACM, New York, NY, USA,  Kobe, Japan, November 13-16, 2011, pp. 212-221. [PDF] [video – WMV]. As featured on Engadget and many other online forums.

Watch CodeSpace video on YouTube