Right Mouse Button Surrogate on Touch Screens

Abstract

The pervasiveness of computer systems is largely determined by their ease of use. Touch screens have proven to be a natural interface with a strong sensorimotor feedback. Although multi-touch technologies are ever more popular, single-touch screens are still often preferred. They are cheaper and they map directly to pointing devices such as computer mice, thus requiring no software modifications. Therefore, they can easily be integrated into existing systems with WIMP interfaces, e.g. MS Windows based systems. Applications in such systems often rely on user pressing the right mouse button to open context menus etc. Since single-touch screens register only one touch at a time, different methods are being used to allow a user to determine the outcome of the touch. The paper proposes a new interaction scheme for this purpose and an algorithm to detect it.