The Groovepad is an input device that augments common touchpads with an elastically suspended frame, which has similar functionality to a joystick. Both input sensors of the device are assembled such that they can be used separately but facilitate frequent and fluent switching between their different input characteristics.

The elastically suspended ring of the Groovepad can be used as a tangible correspondence to the window frames of a graphical user interface. The idea behind this design is to map the input from the Groovepad ring to the panning of an active workspace window. It can also separately be used as a redundant input channel for cursor control.

The increasingly popular zoomable interfaces are potentially a promising application domain for the Groovepad, since they require pointing, panning

and zooming as inherent operations. Pointing and panning is directly supported by the Groovepad and smooth circular gestures along the Groovepad ring can be used to specify the zoom factor.