Thanks to researchers at the University of Calgary, you no longer have to be ashamed of your gigantic thumbs. In fact, their Fat Thumb smartphone interface takes advantage of your opposable digit’s monstrous dimensions to let you fully interact with your device with just one hand. More »
We all know that most of today’s smartphones work better when you have two hands to use them, but there are times when we can’t help but stumble around our phone menus with only one hand accessible to us (i.e. your other hand might be holding a bag of groceries or a drink). Besides getting a smaller phone or larger fingers, we don’t really have a solution to such problems. Well, the folks over at the University of Calgary believe they do with the development of its software technique called Fat Thumb.
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By Ubergizmo. Related articles: HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE now available, Samsung Take Part 2012 app delivers augmented reality gaming,
Everyone’s let it happen at some point — that moment where we’re desperately trying to use our smartphones in one hand while juggling groceries or coffee in the other. There’ll be no way to recover those social graces, but six researchers at the University of Calgary have developed a software technique, Fat Thumb, that should at least keep the contortions and dropped phones to a minimum. As the name implies, it’s all based around pressure: a light touch performs the usual commands, while squishing the thumb’s wider surface area against the screen allows the equivalent of a multi-touch gesture, such as a pinch to zoom. The advantages for comfort and grip virtually speak for themselves; what’s surprising is that Fat Thumb may well be faster than other one-handed gestures. Work on the project is so far confined to a research paper stemming from experiments with an iPhone, although it’s easy to see this spreading to other platforms and real products before too long. Catch a glimpse of the cleverness in action after the break.
University of Calgary’s Fat Thumb trick allows one-handed phone use, jugglers are thankful (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Jul 2012 04:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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