FingerSense Could Finally Make Touchscreens as Versatile as Desktops

Chris Harrison’s software can recognize knuckle-taps and other kinds of gestural input, unlocking new ways to interact with our mobile devices. Ever since Apple invented the modern touchscreen five years ago with the first iPhone, smartphone input has been very Mac-like: Tapping the screen equals a "click," and there is no equivalent to the more PC-like "right click" for directly accessing secondary menus. The "long press" (where you tap the screen and hold the tip of your finger down for an extra bit of time) comes close, but Chris Harrison didn’t think that was good enough--so he invented software that could recognize different kinds of taps, like knuckles and fingernails. In the year since we originally wrote about that software, Harrison and his colleagues have improved the UI and spun it off into a product they’re calling FingerSense. Check it out: FingerSens...