Pinstripe: Eyes-free continuous input anywhere on interactive clothing

What is Pinstripe?

The key idea of Pinstripe is to build an user interface upon two affordances of textiles: grasping and deforming. Most clothes exhibit loose folds in different areas when worn, and Pinstripe makes use of this fact: It lets wearers provide input by pinching a part of their clothing between their thumb and another finger, creating a fold in the garment, and then rolling this fold between their fingers.
It is a textile user interface element for eyes-free, continuous value input on smart garments that uses pinching and rolling a piece of cloth between your fingers. Input granularity can be controlled by the amount of cloth pinched. Pinstripe input elements are invisible, and can be included across large areas of a garment. Pinstripe thus addresses several problems previously identified in the placement and operation of textile UI elements on smart clothing.

The Team

Pinstripe is a research project by Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen, Florian Heller and Jan Borchers from the Media Computing Group.

Publications

2011

Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen, Leonhard Lichtschlag, Florian Heller, and Jan Borchers. Pinstripe: Eyes-free Continuous Input on Interactive Clothing. In Proceedings of the CHI 2011 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vancouver, Canada, May 2011. ACM Press. .

2010

Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen, Florian Heller, and Jan Borchers. Pinstripe: Eyes-free Continuous Input Anywhere on Interactive Clothing. In UIST 2010 Extended Abstracts, New York, NY, October 2010. .

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