Paper Reading #3 Touché: enhancing touch interaction on humans, screens, liquids, and everyday objects

Touché: enhancing touch interaction on humans, screens, liquids, and everyday objects
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2207743

Munehiko Sato & Ivan Poupyrev & Chris Harrison

Munehiko Sato is a PhD candidate at Department of Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Graduate School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo. He is currently working toward a PhD degree in the Cyber Interface Lab under the supervision of Prof. Michitaka Hirose.
http://www.satomunehiko.com/

Dr. Ivan Poupyrev directs an Interaction Technology group in Disney Research's Pittsburgh Lab, Walt Disney Imagineering, a unit of Walt Disney Company.
http://ivanpoupyrev.com/bio/index.php

Chris Harrison is a PhD candidate in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
http://www.chrisharrison.net/

Summary
   These three individuals are working on Touché, a device that can detect subtle gestures or interactions on different kinds of objects. Water and the human body are the objects they are touting as the most useful. These interactions are tracked by a single electrode that is dropped into water or onto an object. This electrode picks up change in frequences and reacts accordingly. So for instance if someone touches a tub of water, their motions such as gently stroking it will be picked up. This invention has a wide range of applications such as smart touch interaction with everyday objects and tracking human touch within a body of water.
   Touch screens are common place today within our smart phones and tablets but this relatively inexpensive device will grant us new types of interaction. Normal touch screens usually only sense if a finger is touching the screen. Touché allows for a host of new gestures to be used on a whim. The way Touché works is there is a general current passing through the human body. Depending on how far away someone is, this affects the signal and in effect, the gesture perceived. A Touché board needs to be implemented in the object if it isn't already current conducive. The board is tuned to be very perceptive to small frequences-- it would have to be to sense tiny hand gestures. Different kind of touches affect the signal frequences as to let the board know which interaction is being used.
   Touché can be very useful by adding minimally intrusive touch interaction with everyday objects. The example these three authors give is a doorknob. The doorknob could be locked on a tight grasp of the handle, or locked for as short as five minutes on a tight pinch. Touché can help in areas like posture. Rehab clinics would greatly profit from the use of this invention. Various applications with liquid, which had otherwise been unattainable, will be made possible with Touché.
   Regardling the experiments they performed, they gathered two groups of 12 people and let them try the product in varying conditions. They each performed the hand gestures multiple times after a training session. The authors concluded that Touché had near a 100% chance success rate and would do perfectly in the market today. The primary thing that Touché would be used for is enhancing everyday objects or individual products. Building this system into certain products could greatly increase their useability and longetivity in the marketplace.

Other papers with similar topics:
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1978942.1979306&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=110758018&CFTOKEN=42757545
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2047196.2047279&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=110758018&CFTOKEN=42757545
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1979742.1979713&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=110758018&CFTOKEN=42757545
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1596990.1596993&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=110758018&CFTOKEN=42757545
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1056808.1056916&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=110758018&CFTOKEN=42757545
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2207676.2208284&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=110758018&CFTOKEN=42757545
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1753326.1753489&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=110758018&CFTOKEN=42757545
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2207676.2208332&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=110758018&CFTOKEN=42757545
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2212776.2223717&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=110758018&CFTOKEN=42757545
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=634067.634252&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=110758018&CFTOKEN=42757545



This idea was extremely novel even though the topic has been explored time and time again. Touch screens are not anything new, they have been around for at least two decades. I believe Touché will make some strides in the Human-Computer Interaction world. Turning everyday objects into interaction hotspots make it very plausible that they will be easier and friendlier to use. The tests they used were 100% controlled. Overall this implementation looks very unique despite the common subject matter.

This paper relates to the others I linked primarily because they each deal with touch screens and way to manipulate them. The first paper, Enhancing physicality in touch interaction with programmable friction, allows the user to feel some friction when they use the touch screen which also enhances touch screen interaction. In another, TapSense: enhancing finger interaction on touch surfaces, they explore using different kinds of objects on touch surfaces to increase participant interaction. These papers all have the common objective of pushing touch screens into the future.

Evaluation
   Sato, Poupyrev, and Harrison did a great job evaluating this project. The first point I noticed was that there was tons of quantitative data to back up their Touché project. They even had graphs so that we could compare the different kinds of interactions and how many frequencies they generated. For instance, if they used a single finger touch, this would generate a different frequency than a knuckle. These three had all of this data plotted out which makes it a very quantitative experiment. There was not as much qualitative data besides describing their participants' testing of their product. The participants described in words that their experience was fine but I think actions spoke louder than words since they were able to pick up the interactions very fast. Their analysis was very objective as they pointed out the hard facts of how their project works and as a by-product, was not very subjective.

Discussion
   I thought the work they did was extremely novel-- not in the topic they presented, but in the method they implemented. I firmly believe this innovation can lead to some great things and further improve our human-computer interactions. The evaluation was great in my opinion with many objective facts to back up their claims and not many biases being stated. I enjoyed this paper and the experiment they conducted. I look forward to hopefully hearing something about Touché in the near future in order to enchance a new host of touch-screen devices or objects.