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
- Jan Thar. Pinstripe: Integration & Evaluation of a Wearable Linear Input Controller for Everyday Clothing. Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, February 2013.
- Stefan Ivanov. TextiPad: Implementation and Evaluation of a Wearable Textile Touchpad. Master's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University,September 2012.
- Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen, Leonhard Lichtschlag, Florian Heller and Jan Borchers. Pinstripe: Eyes-free Continuous Input on Interactive Clothing. In CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1313–1322, ACM Press, Vancouver, Canada, May 2011.
- Thorsten Karrer, Moritz Wittenhagen, Florian Heller and Jan Borchers. Pinstripe: Eyes-free Continuous Input Anywhere on Interactive Clothing. In UIST '10: Adjunct proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, pages 429–430,New York, NY, October 2010.