Is It Gropable? - Assessing the Impact of Mobility on Textile Interfaces

In a mobile environment, the visual attention a person can devote to a computer is often limited. In such situations, a manual interface should be “gropable,” that is, the user should be able to access and use the interface with little to no visual attention. We compare stationary and mobile input on two embroidered textile interfaces; a single touch three button interface and a multitouch four button interface that is activated by pressing two buttons at the same time. Sixteen participants completed 480 trials while walking a path and sitting. While multitouch increases the expressiveness of gestures that can be performed, our user study only shows a slight, not statistically significant, increase in accuracy and an understandable decrease in speed for simple selection tasks.