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A reconfigurable ferromagnetic input device

Published: 04 October 2009 Publication History

Abstract

We present a novel hardware device based on ferromagnetic sensing, capable of detecting the presence, position and deformation of any ferrous object placed on or near its surface. These objects can include ball bearings, magnets, iron filings, and soft malleable bladders filled with ferrofluid. Our technology can be used to build reconfigurable input devices -- where the physical form of the input device can be assembled using combinations of such ferrous objects. This allows users to rapidly construct new forms of input device, such as a trackball-style device based on a single large ball bearing, tangible mixers based on a collection of sliders and buttons with ferrous components, and multi-touch malleable surfaces using a ferrofluid bladder. We discuss the implementation of our technology, its strengths and limitations, and potential application scenarios.

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cover image ACM Conferences
UIST '09: Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
October 2009
278 pages
ISBN:9781605587455
DOI:10.1145/1622176
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: 04 October 2009

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Author Tags

  1. ferromagnetic sensing
  2. malleable surface
  3. multi-touch
  4. reconfigurable input device
  5. tangibles

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

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  • (2022)Pressure-sketch: a tablet-based design system in immersive VRVirtual Reality10.1007/s10055-022-00627-526:3(1207-1215)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2022
  • (2021)Magnetorheological Fluid Haptic Shoes for Walking in VRIEEE Transactions on Haptics10.1109/TOH.2020.301709914:1(83-94)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2021
  • (2021)Through the Looking Glass: Designing Agents for MAS Based Shape-Shifting Technology Using the STEAM ApproachComputer-Human Interaction Research and Applications10.1007/978-3-030-67108-2_5(80-101)Online publication date: 22-Jan-2021
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