Abstract:
With the development of technologies, touch interaction has been pushed far beyond the traditional touchscreen, onto everyday passive surfaces in the physical world. These developments open a wider range of interaction design possibilities, such as more expansive input canvas, richer modalities, easy-to-access interfaces, as well as new design challenges for touch interface design. The complex scenarios we encounter in daily life result in various interaction requirements in terms of multiple aspects, such as sensing capability and system portability. Furthermore, objects of different form factors, e.g., different sizes and 3D shapes, also present challenges in adopting a proper system design. Simply overlaying a touchscreen or touch pad may no longer be applicable. In this thesis, I introduce my effort to extending touch interactions on everyday passive surfaces. Recognising the challenges caused by complex interaction scenarios, I aim to explore touch interactions systematically by approaching touch interactions under four different interaction scenarios - touch input on physical interactive devices, touch interactions on everyday passive flat surfaces, ubiquitous touch interactions on-the-go, and mediated touched surfaces. With my effort to bridging the gap of supporting touch input on everyday surfaces, my thesis will present the following general contributions: 1. a thorough literature review of touch sensing technologies on passive surfaces with a new taxonomy. 2. design and development of novel touch sensing artefacts, including both hardware systems and software algorithms, that support new interaction design spaces. 3. series of evaluations of the artefacts that reveal their sensing capabilities as well as user experience. 4. envisioning and implementing a wide range of novel applications that not only revealing the potential design space, but also inspiring future interaction imagination. Overall, this thesis provides a new perspective on scenarios of touch input on the everyday passive surfaces, as well as novel solutions for improving future interactions.