Providing dynamically changeable physical buttons on a visual display

Physical buttons have the unique ability to provide lowattention and vision-free interactions through their intuitive tactile clues. Unfortunately, the physicality of these interfaces makes them static, limiting the number and types of user interfaces they can support. On the other hand, touch screen technologies provide the ultimate interface flexibility, but offer no inherent tactile qualities. In this paper, we describe a technique that seeks to occupy the space between these two extremes ? offering some of the flexibility of touch screens, while retaining the beneficial tactile properties of physical interfaces. The outcome of our investigations is a visual display that contains deformable areas, able to produce physical buttons and other interface elements. These tactile features can be dynamically brought into and out of the interface, and otherwise manipulated under program control. The surfaces we describe provide the full dynamics of a visual display (through rear projection)...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Chris Harrison, Scott E. Hudson
• Keywords: Beneficial Tactile Properties, CHI 2009, Human Computer Interaction, Inherent Tactile Qualities, Intuitive Tactile Clues