Chris
Harrison

Pulp Nonfiction: Low-Cost Touch Tracking for Paper

Paper continues to be a versatile and indispensable material in the 21st century. Of course, paper is a passive medium with no inherent interactivity, precluding us from computationally-enhancing a wide variety of paper-based activities. In this work, we present a new technical approach for bringing the digital and paper worlds closer together, by enabling paper to track finger input and also drawn input with writing implements. Importantly, for paper to still be considered paper, our method had to be very low cost. This necessitated research into materials, fabrication methods and sensing techniques. We describe the outcome of our investigations and show that our method can be sufficiently low-cost and accurate to enable new interactive opportunities with this pervasive and venerable material.

Additional media can be found on Yang Zhang's site.

This research was generously supported with funding from The David and Lucile Packard Foundation and a Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship.

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Reference

Zhang, Y. and Harrison, C. 2018. Pulp Nonfiction: Low-Cost Touch Tracking for Paper. In Proceedings of the 36th Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montreal, Canada, April 21 - 26, 2018). CHI '18. ACM, New York, NY. Paper 117, 11 pages.

© Chris Harrison