Multimodal Interaction Demo:
Trackball with Contextual Motor Feedback

(a virtual trackball demo is online)

Comfort and directness of control

Guidance to preferred cursor positions

The trackball device with contextual motor feedback combines directness of control with manipulation confort. By supplying corrective force feedback as a function of the current display structure and momentary cursor position, the user's movements are guided towards preferred cursor positions.

Applications

Currently the trackball with contextual motor feedback exists as a laboratory system and contains a single example display with soft keys, demonstration menus, slide bars, and maze tracking exercise for studying speed-accuracy trade-offs in cursor manipulation.

However, many interactive applications can benefit from the trackball with CMF. Contextual motor feedback can be applied for instance:

• In text- and graphics-editors in the office environment;
• For arm chair control of TV or Web TV systems;
• In CAD systems;
• For robust control of car audio systems;
• To add the tactile modality in 'virtual reality' applications.

Hardware and software

In the contextual motor feedback demonstration system, two optical position sensors and two servo motors are used. One combination of position sensor and servo motor handles the cursor position and the tactile feedback along the x-axis, the other combination controls along the y-axis.

Virtual Trackball demo

We have a demo available in which some of the concepts of target aquisition with the contextual force feedback trackball are demonstrated. In this demo, the behaviour of the trackball is simultated on screen. The user can control the ball with a virtual finger. The forcefeedback will be applied on this virtual finger.

open the virtual trackball demo

Contact

For more info, contact Hilde Keuning or Koert van Mensvoort