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Towards tabletop interaction with everyday artifacts via pressure imaging

Published: 24 January 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Tangible user interfaces enable the interaction with digital information through the physical world. For the binding of physical representations with the underlying digital information, technology-augmented artifacts and environments are used. Characteristic for tangible user interfaces is the use of physical artifacts which are either dedicated to or augmented for the purpose of serving as input devices. However, relying on special artifacts limits the widespread use of tangible user interfaces, as they are not suitable for many everyday situations in which we interact with arbitrary artifacts that are not part of the interface. In this paper, we present a novel prototype of a tabletop tangible user interface which is based on pressure imaging. It identifies physical artifacts that are placed on the table by their weight, shape and size, thus enabling the use of a wide range of technology-free artifacts as input devices. We describe the underlying technologies and methods, and discuss the results of a first experiment which shows the recognition accuracy of the presented tabletop interface. Among the positioning of artifacts, their identification is a prerequisite for further interaction modalities and applications. For the recognition of everyday artifacts, a score-based classifier and a set of shape- and weight-based features have been used. The determination of the position of an artifact is fairly simple, as it can be achieved directly from its pressure footprint.

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Cited By

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  • (2020)ForceStampsProceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3374920.3374924(273-285)Online publication date: 9-Feb-2020
  • (2011)GeckosProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/1978942.1979385(2985-2994)Online publication date: 7-May-2011

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cover image ACM Conferences
TEI '10: Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction
January 2010
414 pages
ISBN:9781605588414
DOI:10.1145/1709886
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 24 January 2010

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Author Tags

  1. classification
  2. pressure imaging
  3. tabletop interaction
  4. tangible user interface
  5. technology-free everyday artifacts
  6. ubiquitous computing

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Cited By

View all
  • (2020)ForceStampsProceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3374920.3374924(273-285)Online publication date: 9-Feb-2020
  • (2011)GeckosProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/1978942.1979385(2985-2994)Online publication date: 7-May-2011

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