An Active Tangible Device for Multitouch-Display Interaction

We introduce an interactive tangible input device (TID) for touchscreens. Our approach complements a passive TID design by active micro-controller-driven features focusing on user-experience aspects. The TID provides battery-powered wireless operation, autonomous position sensing capabilities, visual and tactile feedback as well as multiple touch inputs and momentary buttons. The device can be accurately tracked on capacitive touchscreens, enabling novel interaction techniques for content selection and manipulation in 2D or stereoscopic tabletop environments. Mid-air interaction is supported by the use of an inertia measurement unit (IMU) and short-to-mid-range distance sensors. Overall, the presented multi-purpose device can be built using off-the-shelf components, featuring a seamless firmware integration, a 3D-printable body enclosure and Unity3D integration.

@InProceedings{BAS19,
  author       = "Brauer, Christoph and Ariza, Oscar and Steinicke, Frank",
  title        = "An Active Tangible Device for Multitouch-Display Interaction",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of the Mensch und Computer Conference 2019",
  pages        = "accepted",
  year         = "2019",
  url          = "http://basilic.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/Publications/2019/BAS19"
}