Gesture-enhanced single-touch

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Gesture-enhanced single-touch, also known as "dual control", "gesture touch", and often "dual-touch", describes the ability of a touchscreen to register certain two-finger gestures, despite lacking hardware that would allow it to fully register all two-finger movements. [1] A very common application of gesture-enhanced single-touch technology is the pinch-to-zoom gesture, which allows the user to zoom in or out by moving two fingers farther apart or closer together while touching the display.

Touchscreen input/output device usually layered on the top of an electronic visual display

A touchscreen, or touch screen, is an input device and normally layered on the top of an electronic visual display of an information processing system. A user can give input or control the information processing system through simple or multi-touch gestures by touching the screen with a special stylus or one or more fingers. Some touchscreens use ordinary or specially coated gloves to work while others may only work using a special stylus or pen. The user can use the touchscreen to react to what is displayed and, if the software allows, to control how it is displayed; for example, zooming to increase the text size.

Gesture recognition

Gesture recognition is a topic in computer science and language technology with the goal of interpreting human gestures via mathematical algorithms. Gestures can originate from any bodily motion or state but commonly originate from the face or hand. Current focuses in the field include emotion recognition from face and hand gesture recognition. Users can use simple gestures to control or interact with devices without physically touching them. Many approaches have been made using cameras and computer vision algorithms to interpret sign language. However, the identification and recognition of posture, gait, proxemics, and human behaviors is also the subject of gesture recognition techniques. Gesture recognition can be seen as a way for computers to begin to understand human body language, thus building a richer bridge between machines and humans than primitive text user interfaces or even GUIs, which still limit the majority of input to keyboard and mouse and interact naturally without any mechanical devices. Using the concept of gesture recognition, it is possible to point a finger at this point will move accordingly. This could make conventional input on devices such and even redundant.

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Technical background

An important technical reason for the limitation to gesture-enhanced single-touch instead of allowing dual-touch or multi-touch is the type of sensor hardware in the display. Many touchscreen technologies obtain two independent measurements per touch to acquire a 2-dimensional position. Given two distinct touches, however, this returns two pairs of measurements, which can be combined in two ways, producing an ambiguous result. Thus, it is not possible to exactly determine the position of two distinct touches. Still, the average position can be approximated, as well as the distance between the touches, which suffices for some gesture applications. [2]

Multi-touch

In computing, multi-touch is technology that enables a surface to recognize the presence of more than one point of contact with the surface. The origins of multitouch began at CERN, MIT, University of Toronto, Carnegie Mellon University and Bell Labs in the 1970s. Multi-touch was in use as early as 1985. Apple popularized the term "multi-touch" in 2007. Plural-point awareness may be used to implement additional functionality, such as pinch to zoom or to activate certain subroutines attached to predefined gestures.

See also

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References

  1. "What is Multitouch" . Retrieved 31 May 2010.
  2. "Multi-Touch Modes". Archived from the original on 2010-09-21. Retrieved 31 May 2010.