Paper Reading # 14 - A framework for robust and flexible handling of inputs with uncertainty

References:

Julia Schwarz, Scott E. Hudson, Jennifer Mankoff, Andrew D. Wilson

UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology

 

Summary:

New input technologies like touch, recognition based input such as pen gestures and next generation interactions all provide for more natural user interfaces. However, these techniques all create inputs with some uncertainty. Conventional infrastructure lacks a method for easily handling uncertainty, and as a result input produced by these technologies is often converted to conventional events as quickly as possible, leading to a stunted interactive experience. The authors present a framework for handling input with uncertainty in a systematic, extensible, and easy to manipulate fashion. A probabilistic finite state machine can be developed to handle the uncertanty principle, like touching in between two buttons. 

 

 

Discussion:

I think that this would be very useful.  When using touch based input, I have found that often the device misreads where I pressed.  This gets annoying very fast.  Something like this would help reduce the errors that are prone to happen with different inputs.