Bezel-Tap Gestures: Quick activation of commands from sleep mode on tablets

We present Bezel-Tap Gestures, a novel family of interaction techniques for immediate interaction on handheld tablets regardless of whether the device is alive or in sleep mode. The technique rests on the close succession of two input events: first a bezel tap, whose detection by accelerometers will awake an idle tablet almost instantly, then a screen contact. Field studies confirmed that the probability of this input sequence occurring by chance is very low, excluding the accidental activation concern. One experiment examined the optimal size of the vocabulary of commands for all four regions of the bezel (top, bottom, left, right). Another experiment evaluated two variants of the technique which both allow two-level selection in a hierarchy of commands, the initial bezel tap being followed by either two screen taps or a screen slide. The data suggests that Bezel-Tap Gestures may serve to design large vocabularies of micro-interactions with a sleeping tablet.