A Multitouch Drawing Application with Occlusion-Free Interaction Strategies

Abstract

Increasing number of desktop applications are becoming available on smartphones and tablets today with multitouch capabilities, allowing the users’ fingers to perform sophisticated or fine-grained interactivities. However, finger occlusion and imprecision continue to limit the performance of multitouch interactions. Quite a few studies proposed the ways to address this issue, and some of them are now used in commonly encountered situations such as text editing. Many occlusion-avoiding techniques used today focus on initial target acquisition step of touch interaction (e.g. accurately selecting an item or touching a desired starting point in drawing a line), having possible consequences to any further intended action (e.g. dragging the selected item to a different location or drawing a line on the canvas). In order to better understand the influence of finger occlusion-free techniques on other parts of the overall interactions, in this paper we report a full-fledged sketch app that incorporates combinations of basic target acquisition features. As the app is a full-featured, end-to-end tablet prototype, such usability issues can be more readily revealed and discussed in the context of realistic drawing situations.