Clip-on Gadgets: Expandable Tactile Controls For Multi-touch Devices

Virtual keyboards and controls, commonly used on mobile multi-touch devices, occlude content of interest and do not provide tactile feedback. Clip-on Gadgets solve these issues by extending the interaction area of multi-touch devices with physical controllers. Clip-on Gadgets use only conductive materials to map user input on the controllers to touch points on the edges of screens; therefore, they are battery-free, lightweight, and low-cost. In addition, they can be used in combination with multi-touch gestures. We present two hardware designs and a software toolkit, which enable users to simply attach Clip-on Gadgets to an edge of a device and start interacting with it.