Hand distinction for multi-touch tabletop interaction

Dang, C. T., Straub, M., and André, E. 2009. Hand distinction for multi-touch tabletop interaction. In Proceedings of the ACM international Conference on interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (Banff, Alberta, Canada, November 23 - 25, 2009). ITS '09. ACM, New York, NY, 101-108.

Abstract: Recent multi-touch multi-user tabletop systems offer rich touch contact properties to applications. Not only they provide touch positions, but also finger orientations. Applications can use these properties separated for each finger or derive information by combining the given touch contact data. In this paper, we present an approach to map fingers to their associated joined hand contributing to potential enhancements for gesture recognition and user interaction. For instance, a gesture can be composed of multiple fingers of one hand or different hands. Therefore, we present a simple heuristic for mapping fingers to hands that makes use of constraints applied to the touch position combined with the finger orientation. We tested our approach with collected diverse touch contact data and analyze the results.