Paper review: Precise Selection for Multi-Touch Screens

Benko, H., Wilson, A. D., and Baudisch, P. 2006. Precise selection techniques for multi-touch screens. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 - 27, 2006). R. Grinter, T. Rodden, P. Aoki, E. Cutrell, R. Jeffries, and G. Olson, Eds. CHI '06. ACM, New York, NY, 1263-1272.

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In current touch screens there is a problem related with the precision of the human fingers. Most of the graphic user interfaces are designed for mouse interaction where the pointing device precision is much higher and all control objects on the screen can have a low amount of pixels. Keeping in mind that the most appealing aspect of touch screens is the ability to directly touch an object in order to interact with it, this paper explains several techniques to increase the pixel-accuracy of the interaction. The techniques includes simulate pressure using the area of touch and placing the cursor at the top of the finger. Another is to place the cursor at an offset distance from the finger to reach corners or edges.  Using two fingers they propose a resizable zoom window that can be used to facilitate the selection of objects with fingers. Finally it is proposed a model for a contextual menu. The paper has a good related work about multi-touch prototypes and interfaces and has an extensive study on the behavior of the users with these techniques.