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The mouse wheel may induce physical fatigue by requiring users to clutch the wheel repeatedly when scrolling long distances. To address this problem, some mouse products provide a free-spinning mode in which users can spin the wheel to initiate inertial scrolling. However, the time and effort required to toggle the free-spinning mode may lower the usability of the mouse wheel. To enable inertial scrolling without the overhead of mode switching, we present TouchWheel, a physical mouse wheel with touch sensitivity and a virtual wheel model that enables users to perform flick-and-stop operations as they do on touchscreens. A user experiment revealed that participants could actively use TouchWheel's flick-and-stop operation according to their different scrolling needs. For tasks that frequently required long-distance scrolling, TouchWheel outperformed a normal mouse wheel in task completion time and required fewer clutching and mode-switching actions than the normal mouse wheel and a spin-enabled mouse wheel. For tasks that required short-distance scrolling, TouchWheel performed similarly to other baseline options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a new interface concept; Proprioceptive Menu with Tactons, an eyes- and ears-free menu in a proprioceptive space that uses a set of Tactons to describe its menu items. While previous proprioceptive menus utilized vibrotactile feedback only to express the boundary between menu items, we spot an unexplored possibility that distinct vibrotactile stimuli, Tactons, can be used to describe the status of each menu item. As an instance of this concept, we present WristMenu with Tactons, an eyes- and ears-free menu using a one-dimensional proprioceptive space of the axial wrist rotation. Users can grasp an overview of each menu item's status through Tactons delivered on their wrist skin and eventually decide to select the desired item. Our evaluation study showed that users could find a target item among five candidates and recognize its status in 5 seconds on average at the accuracies of 93% and 86% in seated and walking conditions, respectively. Through our evaluation, we could confirm the feasibility of the proposed concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conventional handwriting interface on pen computers uses two parts of the screen. The user must put a text cursor where they want to insert the text and then write on a separate pop-up window that recognizes ink. The separation of the two spaces may cause user fatigue and discomfort because it requires additional gaze and hand movement, which may cause a decrease in text editing efficiency and additional cognitive burden. As an alternative to alleviate these potential problems, we revisited and explored the concept of direct-writing interfaces as used in the past. In this study, we designed and implemented a direct- and indirect-writing text editor. Subsequently, we conducted an experiment to compare the usability of both text editors. The results showed that users' gaze movement distance and frequency could be reduced, and constant time could be saved for each text editing operation using the direct-writing interface. In addition, participants preferred the direct-writing interface when simple and frequent text editing was required. However, the overall throughput of the text editing task was not affected. Lastly, we provided guidelines for further development of a direct-writing interface by combining empirical results, comments, and observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of applications of a one-dimensional (1-D) map as an information processing element are found in the literature on artificial neural networks, image processing systems, and secure communication systems. In search of an efficient hardware implementation of a 1-D map, we discovered that the bifurcating neuron (BN), which was introduced elsewhere as a mathematical model of a biological neuron under the influence of an external sinusoidal signal, could provide a compact solution. The original work on the BN indicated that its firing time sequence, when it was subject to a sinusoidal driving signal, was related to the sine-circle map, suggesting that the BN can compute the sine-circle map. Despite its rich array of dynamical properties, the mathematical description of the BN is simple enough to lend itself to a compact circuit implementation. In this paper, we generalize the original work and show that the computational power of the BN can be extended to compute an arbitrary 1-D map. Also, we describe two possible circuit models of the BN: the programmable unijunction transistor oscillator neuron, which was introduced in the original work as a circuit model of the BN, and the integrated-circuit relaxation oscillator neuron (IRON), which was developed for more precise modeling of the BN. To demonstrate the computational power of the BN, we use the IRON to generate the bifurcation diagrams of the sine-circle map, the logistic map, as well as the tent map, and then compare them with exact numerical versions. The programming of the BN to compute an arbitrary map can be done simply by changing the waveform of the driving signal, which is given to the BN externally; this feature makes the circuit models of the BN especially useful in the circuit implementation of a network of 1-D maps. Index Terms--Bifurcating neuron (BN) , coupled map lattice, neural network, one-dimensional (1-D) map, parametrically coupled map lattice (PCML).