Look Mum, No Stylus on my PDA

Above fast forwarded short clip was a spiced up with text-to-speech voice with the following summaries:

“”Retrieving the stylus of a pen-based device takes time and requires a second hand. Especially for short, intermittent interactions many users therefore choose to use their bare fingers instead. Although convenient, this increases targeting times and error rates. We argue that the main reason is the occlusion of the target by the user’s finger. We propose a pointing technique we call Shift that is designed to address this issue. When the user touches the screen, Shift creates a callout showing a copy of the occluded screen area and places it in a non-occluded location. The callout also shows a pointer representing the hotspot of the finger. Using this visual feedback, users guide the pointer into the target by moving their finger on the screen surface and commit the target acquisition by lifting the finger. Over large targets, in contrast, no callout is created and users enjoy the full performance of an unaltered touch screen. In our user study, participants acquired targets faster when using Shift than when using the traditional offset cursor technique.”” - Patrick Baudisch

Patrick Baudisch’s research paper entitled Shift: A Technique for Operating Pen-Based Interfaces Using Touch received a Best Paper award for CHI 2007, the annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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