Retrofitting Existing 3D Objects with Surface-Conforming Capacitive Sensing
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
The authors developed a method to add touch sensors onto the surfaces of 3D objects without changing their shape. They first scan the object to get its shape, then design and optimize a touch sensor layout that fits the object's surface. This layout is turned into flat stencils cut from copper foil, which can be attached to the object with guidance from projected images. The sensors connect to a controller that detects touch in real time. The authors tested their method on four different 3D objects and showed it works well.
Authors
Andela Ilic, Junpeng Gao, Zhipeng Li, Yijing Jiang, Rachel Schuchert, Manuel Meier, Philipp Herholz, Christian Holz
Abstract
Augmenting the surface of 3D objects with capacitive sensing is challenging when their volumes cannot be modified. In this paper, we present a generative computational fabrication pipeline that retrofits surface-only sensor layouts to 3D geometries for multi-touch interaction. Our method scans a real-world object to obtain its 3D mesh, generates and optimizes a 3D sensor design of drive and sense lines for mutual-capacitance sensing under physical and hardware constraints, and unfolds the design into individual 2D stencils that can be cut from conductive material. Our fabrication pipeline cuts these stencils from thin copper foil with a vinyl cutter and then assists manual sensor attachment by projecting the sensor design onto the dynamically registered real-world object. We connect the resulting electrode mesh to a mutual-capacitance scanning controller and resolve touch interaction in real time. We demonstrate our approach with four 3D geometries and evaluate our method and fabrication pipeline on them.