An interesting poster was presented by Mark Micire from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and Brenden Keyes from Mitre Corp. at last week’s IUI’09 Conference. It dealt with using a multi-touch table to control a mobile robot agent. Multi-touch displays are getting more prominent in different interaction tasks. Here, a physical system is controlled using a highly virtual interface, unlike a joystick, which uses physical motion to control a moving agent.
Mark and his colleagues used a Mitsubishi DiamondTouch display developed at MERL. Unlike our multi-touch table, this one features front projection and capacitive sensors. Front projection allows the system to be placed closer to the ground, but users can occlude the projection with their hands. Our back projection system needs more space in the back, but is not affected by occlusion. In the MERL system, the receiving circuit is located under each user (in the chair or under the feet), which allows the users to be identified by position at the table, but needs a closed circuit through the chair or under the feet.
The research showed that a new user interface can be used by different subjects in different, sometimes unexpected, ways. While the designers wanted to create a ‘virtual joystick’, the users have found analogies with different devices: mouse track-pads, piano keys, touch-typing, steering wheel, etc. This research is great in pioneering novel applications for multi-touch displays.
Oszkar