Belt

Abstract

Belt is a novel unobtrusive input device for wearable displays that incorporates a touch surface encircling the user's hip. The wide input space is leveraged for a horizontal spatial mapping of quickly accessible information and applications. We discuss social implications and interaction capabilities for unobtrusive touch input and present our hardware implementation and a set of applications that benefit from the quick access time. In a qualitative user study with 14 participants we found out that for short interactions (2-4 seconds), most of the surface area is considered as appropriate input space, while for longer interactions (up to 10 seconds), the front areas above the trouser pockets are preferred.

Finding Common Ground

“…Some wearable applications include touch surfaces on belts [43], finger rings [26,218], devices worn near the ear [126], on fingernails [103], or even implanted underneath skin [96]. Following the emergence of flexible conductive materials, such as conductive paint and yarn, wearable interfaces have made hair extensions touch-sensitive [208] and enabled touch sensing on clothing [76,92,152].…”

“…Researchers have since used this approach to implement health applications [8,30,185] and ubiquitous touch interfaces [43,76,92,143,152]. Sensors have thereby been placed on pants [172,185], belts [43,196], shoes [145], gloves [104,209], and jackets [152]. However, manufacturing techniques and long-term deployments (i.e., surviving wash cycles) remain open research areas for such systems [152].…”

“…Hardware for the shunt, transmit, and receive modes is similar and usually consists of an oscillator connected to the transmit electrode to generate an electric field, and an amplifier and analog-to-digital converter (ADC) connected to the receive electrode. In loading mode, [42,64,132,162] →Ink [59,57,58] →Paint [18] →Metalization [208] Gold -non-corrosive, skin-friendly →Gold leaf [98] →Gold coating [11] Aluminum -flexible, high availability →Foil [70,147,196,202] →Mylar [190] Silver -non-corrosive, flexible →Ink [76,87,105,108,203]+ →Thread/Yarn [185] →Plate [67] Carbon -enabling electrical conductivity →Ink [203] →Carbon-filled PDMS (cPDMS) [217] →Filament [20,123,177] ITO -transparent electrodes [64,119,199] Anisotropic materials -directing e-fields →Anisotropic 'Zebra' tape [91] →Anisotropic 'Zebra' rubber [24] Other materials →Water [41,173] & Plants [153] →Ionized gas [72] →Metal objects [43,68,173,207,226]+ →Electro-optic crystal [...…”

A Comparative Study of Pointing Techniques for Eyewear Using a Simulated Pedestrian Environment

“…While the social acceptability of actions may change as technologies become widespread [37], the likelihood of technology adoption is greatly improved if its interaction requirements are socially acceptable [12,45]. Several factors are known to influence the social acceptability of actions, including movement duration (the shorter the better) [8], and movement amplitude (small, discreet movements are better) [37,46].…”

SenseBelt

“…As the pelvic girdle is the most spatially stable part of the body and generally oriented forward, it is the most suitable place for a body-worn spatial tracking device (versus e.g., a person's head). Similar to prior work [4,16,31], we therefore leverage the belt form factor for egocentric interaction.…”