RIME: Rich Interactive Materials for Everyday Objects in the Home
Project Goal
Over the course of several million years, our hands and fingers have evolved to be capable of expressing a rich vocabulary of grasps and tangible manipulation gestures, and to touch, sense, and intimately experience the rich variety of material and object properties surrounding us that can inform and delight us. The aim of RIME is to unlock this interactive potential for rich interaction with the materials in our smart environments.
Approach
The key approach of RIME to achieve this goal is through designing, prototyping, and evaluating scalable sensor and actuator technology and touch interaction paradigms for seamless integration into everyday materials and objects, to enable natural and scalable hands-on interactions with our future smart homes. As a result, the physical artifacts in our homes, such as chairs, tables, walls, and other surfaces, can be equipped with an interactive digital “skin”, or contain interactive sensor and actuator materials; and swiping along a table, say, to unfold it for additional guests may become a possible scenario.
About the Project
This project runs from 2020 until 2023 and is funded through the German National Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft, DFG) within its Priority Programme 2199: Scalable Interaction Paradigms for Pervasive Computing Environments. It is carried out by Prof. Dr. Jan Borchers' research group at RWTH Aachen University, in collaboration with the research groups of Prof. Dr. Susanne Boll at the University of Oldenburg, and Prof. Dr. Jürgen Steimle at Saarland University.
SPP: https://scalableinteractionparadigms.uni-oldenburg.de/blog/
Publications
SPP Winter School 03/2021
Winter School 2023
CHI'23 Interactivity
Paper
Thesis
| Name | Topic | Thesis Type | Year |
| Mahsa Mansouri | The Taxonomy of Indoor Home Interfaces | Bachelor's Thesis |
Summer 2021 |
| Mathis Beck | AirPixel: Prototyping a Pneumatically Actuated Shape Display with a Textile Surface | Bachelor's Thesis |
Summer 2021 |
| Huy Dao | Development of a Hand Detection on a Large-Area Textile Capacitive Pressure Sensor Matrix | Bachelor's Thesis |
Summer 2021 |
| Sebastian Pettirsch | Evaluating Out-of-Sight Textile User Interfaces for Multiple Devices | Master's Thesis | Winter 2021 |
| Fabian Friedrichs | Unused sides: Discovering the potential of unused surfaces in the home | Master's Thesis | Winter 2021 |
| Lovis Suchmann | Textile Icons: Investigating Shape Properties to Improve Haptic Recognition | Master's Thesis | Winter 2021 |
| Nikita Huber | Avoiding Accidental Input: Evaluating Activation and Confirmation Techniques on Textile Sliders | Bachelor's Thesis | Winter 2021 |
| Michelle Mirus | Designing Tactile Guides for Smart Home Controls | Bachelor's Thesis | Summer 2022 |
| Laura Drescher-Manaa | Designing a Magnetic Field Sensor Grid for 2D Mid-air Gesture Recognition | Bachelor's Thesis | Summer 2022 |
| Dustin Schneider | Position Tracking of Magnetic Dipoles Using a Modular AMR Sensor Grid | Master's Thesis | Winter 2022 |
| Thomas Becker | End User Perspective on Using Everyday Objects for Smart Home Input | Master's Thesis | Summer 2023 |
| Maurice Schwarze | People's Understanding of Textile User Interfaces with Different Complexity | Master's Thesis | Winter 2023 |
| Erik Müller | Finding the Limits of Textile Interface Design Guidelines | Bachelor's Thesis | Winter 2023 |
Team at RWTH
Contact
If you have any questions about the project, please contact Oliver Nowak.
Publication List (RWTH)
- Oliver Nowak, Lennart Becker, Sebastian Pettirsch and Jan Borchers. Mappings in the Home: Selecting Home Appliances in 3D Space. In Extended Abstracts of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '24 (Forthcoming), pages 7, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, May 2024.
- Dustin Schneider. Position Tracking of Magnetic Dipoles Using a Modular AMR Sensor Grid. Master's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, November 2023.
- Elisabeth Jane Buttkus. Measuring Perceived Haptic Similarities Between Textile Icons. Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, April 2023.
- René Schäfer, Oliver Nowak, Lovis Bero Suchmann, Sören Schröder and Jan Borchers. What’s That Shape? Investigating Eyes-Free Recognition of Textile Icons. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '23, pages 12, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, April 2023.
- Laura Drescher-Manaa. Designing a Magnetic Field Sensor Grid for 2D Mid-Air Gesture Recognition. Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, September 2022.
- Michelle Mirus. Designing Tactile Guides for Smart Home Controls. Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, September 2022.
- Lovis Suchmann. Textile Icons: Investigating Shape Properties to Improve Haptic Recognition. Master's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, August 2022.
- Sebastian Pettirsch. Spatial Mappings in the Home: Evaluating Targeting Techniques to Control Smart Home Devices. Master's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, June 2022.
- Oliver Nowak, René Schäfer, Anke Brocker, Philipp Wacker and Jan Borchers. Shaping Textile Sliders: An Evaluation of Form Factors and Tick Marks for Textile Sliders. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '22, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, April 2022.
- Nikita Huber. Avoiding Accidental Input: Evaluating Activation and Confirmation Techniques on Textile Sliders. Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, March 2022.
- Huy Dao. Development of a Hand Detection on a Large-Area Textile Capacitive Pressure Sensor Matrix. Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, January 2022.
- Mahsa Mansouri. The Taxonomy of Indoor Home Interfaces. Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, January 2022.
- Mathis Beck. AirPixel: Prototyping a Pneumatically Actuated Shape Display with a Textile Surface. Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, November 2021.