Back-of-Device Interaction Talk by Patrick Baudisch

Last Friday, April 10th 2009, Project54 students visited MIT to hear Patrick Baudisch‘s lecture on Back-of-Device Interaction. Patrick is a research scientist at Microsoft Research and an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington.

He presented his findings on researching back-of-device interfaces, which is an interesting new concept of human-computer interaction. A predecessor of the current solution was the lucidTouch project, which provided a semi transparent display screen using a camera mounted on a boom. This solution was novel but not too practical. Since then, Baudisch and his group developed a more sophisticated method for back-of-device interaction: the nanoTouch. Here, the camera based system is replaced with a clickable touchpad on the back of the device.

This is an interesting solution borrowed from the Microsoft Zune MP3 player. It is a touchpad which can be clicked as a momentary push-button switch.

What is the advantage of an interface like this, compared to conventional touch devices that can be operated from the front side, like the iPhone for example? When trying to activate a virtual button from the front, the fingers obscure the critical part of the screen. This makes typing on a virtual keyboard challenging. Patrick presented the results of their study where they found that using the back-of-device interface produces less button-press errors compared to front-of-device touch screens. Also it seems that the new interface will allow reduction in screen and device sizes. Patrick even showed us concept images of wrist watches and rings which could benefit from this interface. As always, Baudisch’s presentation was visually very sophisticated with elaborate images and design.

All in all it was a very interesting talk. I can’t wait to see this technology in an actual product.

Oszkar