DipMe: Haptic Recognition of Granular Media for Tangible Interactive Applications
This enables tangible user interfaces to incorporate granular materials as interaction media, connecting physical granular objects with virtual content, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of recognizing granular materials in real time for tangible interactive applications by introducing DipMe, a smart device that uses haptic signals from a dip operation, achieving distinguishable recognition with modern machine learning tools.
While tangible user interface has shown its power in naturally interacting with rigid or soft objects, users cannot conveniently use different types of granular materials as the interaction media. We introduce DipMe as a smart device to recognize the types of granular media in real time, which can be used to connect the granular materials in the physical world with various virtual content. Other than vision-based solutions, we propose a dip operation of our device and exploit the haptic signals to recognize different types of granular materials. With modern machine learning tools, we find the haptic signals from different granular media are distinguishable by DipMe. With the online granular object recognition, we build several tangible interactive applications, demonstrating the effects of DipMe in perceiving granular materials and its potential in developing a tangible user interface with granular objects as the new media.