Natural user interfaces for multitouch devices

Matej Bukovinski (2010) Natural user interfaces for multitouch devices. EngD thesis.

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Abstract

This thesis presents a new class of user interfaces, which a commonly referred to as natural user interfaces. It discusses their main characteristics, evolution and advantages over currently dominant graphical user interfaces. Special attention is devoted to the subgroup of natural user interfaces for multitouch devices. Multitouch technology is firstly presented from a technical point of view and afterwards also in practice in form of a comparative study of six popular multitouch platforms. Most attention is devoted to the iOS platform, which facilitates development for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad range of devices. The central part of this work discusses the characteristics of multitouch user interfaces. This section states the specific concepts of multitouch interfaces and summarizes key findings and directives from specialist literature and scientific research. Theoretical findings are additionally illustrated with a case study of five characteristic multitouch applications. The closing sections firstly present the social network Twitter. Subsequently we introduce an iPad application called Corkboard, a multitouch Twitter client that was developed in the scope of this thesis. By utilizing the Corkboard application, we present a possible approach for integrating multitouch user interface concepts into a data driven application and demonstrate the design and development process of multitouch applications. We conclude with a summary of principal findings and an overview of directions for possible future work.

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