FORCE-UI: Research Themes
The FORCE-UI project will radically change touch and touchscreen interaction by the addition of force, creating the new Force-Responsive Deformable User Interfaces paradigm (FRUI, said ‘F-R-U-I’). Beyond the current capabilities of touchscreens (visual output, touch, and touch-gesture input) we envision the next generation of displays to support force in the following ways:
- Deformable Force Input: by applying increasing force to the display, elements of the surface physically deform, allowing the user to convey force and depth in conjunction with traditional touch.
- Resistive Force Feedback: real-time adjustment of the surface’s stiffness allows the device to provide a new type of output and alter the force required from the user to create input.
- Kinetic Force Feedback: by actuating select areas of the display surface, the device can 'push back' on the user's fingers.
The work in this project is broken into four core themes:
- Develop engineering approaches for integrating multi-point deformable force input, resistive force feedback, and kinetic force feedback into a single display surface.
- Empirically characterise and model fundamental user behaviour with deformable force-responsive user interfaces.
- Design conceptual models of interaction for deformable force-responsive user interfaces.
- Evaluate interaction techniques that exploit the expressive power of deformable force-responsive interfaces.
Progress towards these themes can be following via our publications.
