PUCs: Transparent, Passive Untouched Capacitive Widgets on Unmodified Multi-touch Displays

Capacitive multi-touch displays are not designed to detect passive objects placed on them—in fact, these systems usually contain filters to actively reject such touch data. We present a technical analysis of this problem and introduce Passive Untouched Capacitive Widgets (PUCs). Unlike previous approaches, PUCs do not require power, they can be made entirely transparent, they are detected reliably even when no user is touching them, and they do not require internal electrical or software modifications of the touch display or its driver. PUCs can be used on mostly any off-the-shelf capacitive touch display.

Contact: Simon Völker

2015

• Simon Voelker, Kjell Ivar Øvergård, Chat Wacharamanotham and Jan Borchers. Knobology Revisited: A Comparison of User Performance between Tangible and Virtual Rotary Knobs.  In ITS '15: Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, pages 35–38, ACM, New York, NY, USA, November 2015.
  

2014

• Simon Voelker, Christian Corsten, Nur Al-huda Hamdan, Kjell Ivar Øvergård and Jan Borchers. An Interaction Model for Grasp-Aware Tangibles on Interactive Surfaces.  In ITS '14: Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, pages 279–282, ACM, New York, NY, USA, November 2014.
  
• Simon Voelker, Christian Corsten, Nur Al-huda Hamdan, Kjell Ivar Øvergård and Jan Borchers. An Interaction Model for Touch-Aware Tangibles on Interactive Surfaces.  In CHI '14: Extended Abstracts of the 2014 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems,April 2014.
  
• Kosuke Nakajima, Yuichi Itoh, Simon Voelker, Christian Thoresen, Kjell Ivar Øvergård and Jan Borchers. PUCs: Detecting Transparent, Passive Untouched Capacitive Widgets on Unmodified Multi-touch Displays.  In Proc. IPSJ Interaction '14: Proceedings of the Conference on Information Processing Society of Japan, pages 108–113, Information Processing Society of Japan, 2014.
  

2013

• Simon Voelker, Kosuke Nakajima, Christian Thoresen, Yuichi Itoh, Kjell Ivar Øvergård and Jan Borchers. PUCs: Detecting Transparent, Passive Untouched Capacitive Widgets on Unmodified Multi-touch Displays.  In ITS '13: Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, pages 101–104, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2013.
  
• Simon Voelker, Kosuke Nakajima, Christian Thoresen, Yuichi Itoh, Kjell Ivar Øvergård and Jan Borchers. PUCs Demo: Detecting Transparent, Passive Untouched Capacitive Widgets.  In ITS EA '13: Extended Abstracts of the ITS '13: Proceedings of the 2013 ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, pages 325–328, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2013.
  
• Simon Voelker, Kosuke Nakajima, Christian Thoresen, Yuichi Itoh, Kjell Ivar Øvergård and Jan Borchers. PUCs Demo: Detecting Transparent, Passive Untouched Capacitive Widgets on Unmodified Multi-touch Displays.  In UIST EA '13: Extended Abstracts of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pages 1–2, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2013.