“PhotoelasticTouch: Transparent Rubbery Interface using a LCD and Photoelasticity” by Sato, Mamiya, Tokui, Koike and Fukuchi

PhotoelasticTouch is a tabletop system designed to intuitively facilitate touch-based interaction via real objects made from transparent elastic material. The transparent elastic material (transparent rubber) provides a realistic haptic interface, which when combined with the visual content displayed on the LCD tabletop, enables a balanced coupling of the physical world and digital content. The system utilizes the photo-elastic properties of the transparent rubber to recognize when a user pushes, pulls or pinches the object, while the LCD provides the appropriate visual feedback in accordance to the stress applied to the elastic material.

The technical contribution of the PhotoelasticTouch system is the use of the transparent photo-elastic material to detect the stress applied to tangible objects on the LCD table. Previous visionbased force-sensitive elastic body interfaces [Kamiyama et al. 2004][Kakehi et al. 2008] require special markers to be embedded inside the elastic material which imposed restrictions on the shape of the elastic material. In contrast, our system does not require any markers and does not place any restrictions on the shape of the elastic material.

References

KAKEHI, Y., JO, K., SATO, K., MINAMIZAWA, K., NII, H., KAWAKAMI, N., NAEMURA, T., AND TACHI, S. 2008. Forcetile: tabletop tangible interface with vision-based force distribution sensing. In SIGGRAPH 2008 new tech demos, ACM.

KAMIYAMA, K., KAJIMOTO, H., VLACK, K., KAWAKAMI, N., MIZOTA, T., AND TACHI, S. 2004. Gelforce. In SIGGRAPH 2004 Emerging technologies, ACM.