Touch Usability: TWEND: Twisting and Bending as Input Gestures

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April 23, 2008

TWEND: Twisting and Bending as Input Gestures

"TWEND" is a student research competition entry (and runner-up winner) from CHI 2008 by Gero Herkenrath, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers of RWTH Aachen University in Germany.

They embedded optical bend sensors into foam and plastic prototypes. Users can bend the object to perform actions like scrolling, zooming, and page flipping. They see this as being most useful for mobile devices -- sort of like Microsoft's force sensors, but in this case you can really bend the device. This would make for a pretty slick soft e-book reader.

Their project page has more pictures and details: TWEND: Twisting and Bending as new Interaction Gesture in Mobile Devices.

Posted at 07:23 PM in Design, Gestures, Research, Usability, Web/Tech | Permalink

Technorati Tags: CHI 2008

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About Me

Kevin Arthur is a usability analyst working with touch interfaces at Synaptics in Santa Clara, CA. This blog is a personal project and the opinions here are strictly my own.

My other blog: Question Technology

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