Evaluation of human tangential force input performance

While interacting with mobile devices, users may press against touch screens and also exert tangential force to the display in a sliding manner. We seek to guide UI design based on the tangential force applied by a user to the surface of a hand-held device. A prototype of an interface using tangential force input was implemented utilizing a force sensitive layer and an elastic layer and used for the user experiment. We investigated user controllability to reach and maintain target force levels and considered the effects of hand pose and direction of force input. Our results imply no significant difference in performance when applying force holding the device in one hand and in two hands. We also observed that users have more physical and perceived loads when applying tangential force in the left-right direction compared to the up-down direction. Based on the experimental results, we discuss considerations for user interface applications of tangential-force-based interface.

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