Description:

We present a pressure-augmented tactile interaction technique to improve 3D object/view manipulation tasks on mobile devices. Existing tactile techniques for mobile data exploration either make use of up to four fingers to control all the needed degrees of freedom (DOF) for 3D manipulation or simultaneously adjust multiple DOF together to reduce the number of fingers needed for interaction. Yet the small display size of mobile devices limits the number of fingers that should simultaneously be used. Controlling each DOF for 3D data exploration separately, however, gives users more control. We address this contradiction by combining tactile and pressure input. We thus use pressure to intuitively switch between different tactile interaction modes. In this extended abstract we describe our interaction design as well as our rationale for the input mappings.