GestAKey: Touch Interaction on Individual Keycaps

Conventionally, keys on a physical keyboard have only two states: ``released’’ and ``pressed’’. As such, various techniques, such as hotkeys, are designed to enhance the keyboard expressiveness. Realizing that user inevitably perform touch actions during keystrokes, we propose GestAKey, leveraging location and motion of the touch on individual keycaps to augment the functionalities of existing keystrokes. With a log study, we collected touch data for both normal usage (typing and hotkeys) and while performing touch gestures (location and motion), which are analyzed to assess the viability of augmenting keystrokes with simultaneous gestures. A controlled experiment was conducted to compare GestAKey with existing keyboard interaction techniques, in terms of efficiency and learnability. The results show that GestAKey has comparable performance with hotkey. We further discuss the insights of integrating such touch modality into existing keyboard interaction, and demonstrate several usage scenarios.