TZee

Abstract

Manipulating 3D objects on a tabletop is inherently problematic. Tabletops lack a third degree of freedom and thus require novel solutions to support even the simplest 3D manipulations. Our solution is TZee -a passive tangible widget that enables natural interactions with 3D objects by exploiting the lighting properties of diffuse illumination (DI) multitouch tabletops. TZee is assembled from stacked layers of acrylic glass to extend the tabletop's infrared light slightly above the surface without supplemental power. With TZee, users can intuitively scale, translate and rotate objects in all three dimensions, and also perform more sophisticated gestures, like "slicing" a volumetric object, that have not been possible with existing tabletop interaction schemes. TZee is built with affordable and accessible materials, and one tabletop surface can easily support multiple TZees. Moreover, since TZee is transparent, there are numerous possibilities to augment interactions with feedback, helpful hints, or other visual enhancements. We discuss several important design considerations and demonstrate the value of TZee with several applications.

Flexibles

“…A body of research has investigated how optical approaches can be used to detect tangible objects on a touchscreen [2,55]. More recent work is investigating how to detect tangibles using the now commonplace capacitive touchscreens.…”

Passive yet Expressive TouchTokens

“…The most common approach to enabling tangible interaction on surfaces that use diffuse illumination technology consists in augmenting the objects with fiducial markers, and using a vision-based algorithm to identify them and track their location (see, e.g., [5]). Other projects have investigated tangibles that reflect incoming light to the surface in a specific way in order to support more manipulations, such as TZee tangibles [14], which have the shape of a truncated pyramid and support gesturing on their sides, or Lumino blocks [1], which can be stacked. Diffuse illumination is a solution that is usually reserved to large setups such as tabletops.…”

Byo*

“…Early prior work investigates how to detect tangible objects on an optical touchscreen [2,25]. More recently, commonplace capacitive sensing technology is employed to detect tangibles.…”