Chapter 7

Input Technologies and Techniques

Ken Hinckley
Microsoft Research

 

Outline

Introduction: What's an Input Device Anyway?

Understanding Input Technologies

Pointing Device Properties

Taxonomies of Input Devices

A Brief Tour of Pointing Devices

Input Device States

What's an Input Device For? The Composition of User Tasks

Elemental Tasks

Compound Tasks and Chunking

Evaluation and Analysis of Input Devices

Representative Tasks for Pointing Devices

Ergonomic Issues for Input Devices

Fitts' Law: A Design, Engineering, and Research Tool

Other Metrics and Models of Input

Mappings: How to Get the Most out of an Input Signal

Transfer Functions

Design Challenges for Real-Time Response

Feedback: What Happens in Response to an Input?

Passive Feedback

Input-Output Correspondence

Active Haptic Feedback

Keyboards and Text Entry Techniques

Do Keyboards Have a Future?

Procedural Memory

Trends in Keyboard Design

One-Handed Keyboards

Soft Keyboards

Character Recognition

The Future of Input

Acknowledgement

References

 

Figures

Table 7.1: Summary of States in Buxton ’s Three-State Model (Buxton,1990b).

Figure 7.2: Task hierarchies for one-dimensional, two-dimensional, and three-dimensional position tasks.

Figure 7.3: Fitts ’task paradigm (see Fitts,1954).

Figure 7.4: The Steering Law for (a) straight and (b) circular tunnels (Accot &Zhai,1999).Steering through a straight tunnel is modeled by Equation 9.8.Steering through a circular tunnel of width W and Radius R is modeled by Equation 9.9.In both cases, the user starts at the vertical line and attempts to follow the dotted line without moving outside the tunnel. The dotted lines here are for illustration only and typically would not be shown to participants in an actual experiment.