Finding Common Ground

Abstract

For more than two decades, capacitive sensing has played a prominent role in human-computer interaction research. Capacitive sensing has become ubiquitous on mobile, wearable, and stationary devices-enabling fundamentally new interaction techniques on, above, and around them. The research community has also enabled human position estimation and whole-body gestural interaction in instrumented environments. However, the broad field of capacitive sensing research has become fragmented by different approaches and terminology used across the various domains. This paper strives to unify the field by advocating consistent terminology and proposing a new taxonomy to classify capacitive sensing approaches. Our extensive survey provides an analysis and review of past research and identifies challenges for future work. We aim to create a common understanding within the field of human-computer interaction, for researchers and practitioners alike, and to stimulate and facilitate future research in capacitive sensing.

Deformation Capture via Soft and Stretchable Sensor Arrays

“…Since then capacitive coupling effects have been used to sense touch, detect and discriminate user grip and grasp, detect and track objects on interactive surfaces, track 3D positions and proximity and coarsely classify 3D poses and gestures. We refer to the survey by Grosse-Puppendahl et al [2017] for an exhaustive treatment. Notably, flexible and bendable sensors [Gotsch et al 2016;Han et al 2014;Poupyrev et al 2016] and those directly worn on the user's skin [Kao et al 2016;Nittala et al 2018;Weigel et al 2015] have been proposed.…”

“…Moreover, such sensors have not been demonstrated to be accurate enough for motion capture and are typically limited to measurement of uniaxial deformation. Please note that capacitive sensing is often considered synonymous with touch sensing [Grosse-Puppendahl et al 2017;Lee et al 1985;Rekimoto 2002], in which capacitive coupling effects are leveraged to detect finger contact with a static sensor. In this paper, however, the term is used in a different sense, referring to the fact that capacitance changes when an electrode undergoes deformations.…”

Multi-Touch Kit

“…Arguably, the most frequently used method and industry stan dard for sensing touch is projected capacitive sensing [11,9,8]. Specifically, mutual-capacitive sensing enables highresolution sensing of multiple simultaneous touch contacts, can be embedded in small form-factor devices [11,31] and have a low-latency [24]. Despite its popularity, prototyping multi-touch needs advanced knowledge of the underlying tech nology and specialized hardware.…”

“…It can be easily realized by electronics novices using the Arduino CapSense library and easily adapted to custom designs. Sev eral commercial controllers are available for loading mode sensing, such as MPR121, Microchip MTCH6102, and Ana log Devices AD7142 [12]. However this technique is low resolution and restricted to single touch.…”

“…Other operating modes are transmit and receive modes. In these sensing modes, the coupling between the body and one of the electrodes is greater than the coupling between the body and the other electrode or between the transmitter and the receiver [12]. The same hardware as shunt mode is also used for transmit and receive modes [12].…”