Paper Reading #2: Touché: enhancing touch interaction on humans, screens, liquids, and everyday objects

Introduction
Title: Touché: enhancing touch interaction on humans, screens, liquids, and everyday objects
Author Bios: Munehiko Sato-Disney Research, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA & The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
Ivan Poupyrev-Disney Research, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Chris Harrison-Disney Research, Pittsburgh & Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

Summary

What they did in this paper was they tried to find a different form of capacitive touch sensing, they called it Touché. Instead of using the normal capacitive touch sensing they used a novel form called Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing (SFCS). This is different because rather than having a conductive object excited by a signal at a fixed frequency it uses a range of frequencies which would let them measure a lot more data points. Using this they testing how Touché could be used in the world today and how it could improve touch based systems. They even tested making liquid a touch surface, seeing how many fingers were in the water or seeing if only the surface was touched. They tested 5 domains with their new system: making everyday objects gesture sensitive, sensing human bi manual hand gestures, sensing human body configuration, enhancing traditional touch surfaces, and sensing interaction with unusual materials.

Related Work


Evaluation
They used a qualitative unbiased approach to the evaluation. They had the people train gestures and then proceeded to see if Touché could pick up that certain gesture with slight differences and measure the accuracy that way. They then took out the worst gesture to see how good the system could be at different things. They tested a door knob, body configuration, enhancing a touchscreen, on-body gesture sensing, and touching liquids.

Discussion
I thought their work was very interesting and extremely novel, I have never heard of any system able to see if you are touching a liquid or if your hand is submerged. I think the research presented in this paper will help innovate the touch sensing world and make way for new ways to tell a computer what to do and what gestures can be recognized.