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Bringing physics to the surface

Published: 19 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

This paper explores the intersection of emerging surface technologies, capable of sensing multiple contacts and of-ten shape information, and advanced games physics engines. We define a technique for modeling the data sensed from such surfaces as input within a physics simulation. This affords the user the ability to interact with digital objects in ways analogous to manipulation of real objects. Our technique is capable of modeling both multiple contact points and more sophisticated shape information, such as the entire hand or other physical objects, and of mapping this user input to contact forces due to friction and collisions within the physics simulation. This enables a variety of fine-grained and casual interactions, supporting finger-based, whole-hand, and tangible input. We demonstrate how our technique can be used to add real-world dynamics to interactive surfaces such as a vision-based tabletop, creating a fluid and natural experience. Our approach hides from application developers many of the complexities inherent in using physics engines, allowing the creation of applications without preprogrammed interaction behavior or gesture recognition.

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cover image ACM Conferences
UIST '08: Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
October 2008
308 pages
ISBN:9781595939753
DOI:10.1145/1449715
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 19 October 2008

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  1. game physics engines
  2. interactive surfaces

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Overall Acceptance Rate 561 of 2,567 submissions, 22%

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  • (2024)Comparing Physics-based Hand Interaction in Virtual Reality: Custom Soft Body Simulation vs. Off-the-Shelf Integrated Solution2024 IEEE Conference Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR)10.1109/VR58804.2024.00094(743-753)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2024
  • (2023)Hand Tracking and Gesture Recognition by Multiple Contactless Sensors: A SurveyIEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems10.1109/THMS.2022.318884053:1(35-43)Online publication date: Feb-2023
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