EclipseTouch: Touch Segmentation on Ad Hoc Surfaces using Worn Infrared Shadow Casting
This addresses the need for accurate touch detection on everyday surfaces in mixed reality systems, offering an incremental improvement over prior methods.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting touch events on uninstrumented surfaces for mixed reality by introducing EclipseTouch, a headset-integrated technique using infrared shadow casting, achieving a mean hover distance error of 6.9 mm and 98.0% touch contact accuracy.
The ability to detect touch events on uninstrumented, everyday surfaces has been a long-standing goal for mixed reality systems. Prior work has shown that virtual interfaces bound to physical surfaces offer performance and ergonomic benefits over tapping at interfaces floating in the air. A wide variety of approaches have been previously developed, to which we contribute a new headset-integrated technique called \systemname. We use a combination of a computer-triggered camera and one or more infrared emitters to create structured shadows, from which we can accurately estimate hover distance (mean error of 6.9~mm) and touch contact (98.0\% accuracy). We discuss how our technique works across a range of conditions, including surface material, interaction orientation, and environmental lighting.