Haptic and Touchless User Input Methods for Simple 3D Interaction Tasks: Interaction Performance and User Experience for People with and Without Impairments

The sense of touch is of crucial importance for humans, especially those with impairments. Traditionally, most input devices (e.g., mice, joysticks or touchpads) accounted for this by involving at least a certain amount of a haptic experience during human-computer interaction processes. However, during the past years, also touchless input devices that enable user input without physical contact between human and device, became popular and available for mass markets. While these input devices such as Microsoft Kinect or the Leap motion controller bear high potential for certain settings (e.g., therapeutic ones) and usually support more than two degrees of freedom, they also involve new challenges like missing borders and thus physical restrictions of the interaction space. This chapter summarizes two investigations around the actual relevance of a haptic experience in user input for people with and without known impairments. Both studies focused on simple input tasks in a 3D interaction space and involve an analysis of interaction performance and User Experience, comparing three input devices with varying amount of haptics.