Multi-Touch: A New Tactile 2-D Gesture Interface for Human-Computer Interaction

The naturalness and variety of a touch-based hand gesture interface offers new opportunities for human-computer interaction. Using a new type of capacitive sensor array, a Multi-Touch Surface (MTS) can be created that is not limited in size, that can be presented in many configurations, that is robust under a variety of environmental operating conditions, and that is very thin. Typing and gesture recognition built into the Multi-Touch Surface allow users to type and perform bilateral gestures on the same surface area and in a smaller footprint than is required by current keyboard and mouse technologies. The present approach interprets asynchronous touches on the surface as conventional single-finger typing, while motions initiated by chords are interpreted as pointing, clicking, gesture commands, or hand resting. This approach requires learning only a few new chords for graphical manipulation, rather than a vocabulary of new chords for typing the whole alphabet. Graphical manipulation seems a better use of chords in today's computing environment.