(A) touch-less multi-point input device with IR-based virtual plane

Abstract

Recently, multi-touch input technology has received wide attention as a new fashioned input interaction. The multi-touch input technology enables users to manipulate computing interfaces with intuitive and natural motions beyond the limited input capability of the mouse and keyboard. The stream of current researches, however, does not consider well end-users in the desktop environment. Representative multi-touch input devices are too massive to place it on the desktop, moreover, they are prone to cause occlusion problem and fatigues at the hands or neck since the devices are usually based on the touch screen; it means that it is also unsuitable for a longtime usage. The goals of this thesis are to develop a suitable multi-touch input device and present an appropriate interaction styles for desktop environment. In this thesis, we investigated principles of previous multi-touch input technologies with categorizing them to the vision-based, capacitance-based, and photoelectric sensor-based methods. Based on the survey, we suggest a photoelectric sensor based input device which permits users to touch the front surface as a virtual touch-plane. The key idea of the sensor system is to capture the distribution of reflected infra-red light by fingers and to detect positions of fingers with a pattern recognition algorithm. We implement two prototypes to realize the sensor system, and the second prototype is utilizing a scanning method for detecting multi points and Spline interpolation technique to find the peak-points from the scanned distribution. An interaction style which we propose is to operate the device under the situation which a user’s head is toward to the display and hands are on the surface; it minimizes the fatigues at hands and neck. We examine the accuracy/performance in the evaluation and possible applications for the proposed input device are also suggested with description for each function. Finally, merits/demerits of the proposed device and future w...