Chris
Harrison

Touché: Enhancing Touch Interaction on Humans, Liquids, and Everyday Objects

Touché proposes a novel form of capacitive touch sensing that we call Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing (SFCS). This technology can infuse rich touch and gesture sensitivity into a variety of analogue and digital objects. For example, Touché can not only detect touch events, but also recognize complex configurations of the hands and body. Such contextual information can enhance a broad range of applications, from conventional touchscreens to unique contexts and materials, including the human body and liquids. Instrumenting objects with Touché is trivial: a single electrode needs to be attached or embedded in an object and connected to our sensor. In the case of conductive objects, e.g., doorknobs or a body of water, the object itself acts as an intrinsic electrode – no additional instrumentation is necessary. Finally, Touché is inexpensive, safe, low power and compact; it can be easily embedded or temporarily attached anywhere touch and gesture sensitivity is desired.

Collaborators

Munehiko Sato
Ivan Poupyrev

This research was undertaken at Disney Research Pittsburgh.

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Reference

Sato, M. Poupyrev, I, and Harrison, C. 2012. Touché: Enhancing Touch Interaction on Humans, Screens, Liquids, and Everyday Objects. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Austin, Texas, May 5 - 10, 2012). CHI '12. ACM, New York, NY. 483-492.

© Chris Harrison