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WebClip: a connector for ubiquitous physical input and output for touch screen devices

Published: 08 September 2013 Publication History

Abstract

It has become extremely easy for developers to build custom software for smartphone and tablet computers. However, it is still hard to extend those devices with external electronics, e.g. additional sensors and actuators. In the moment when external hardware can be easily attached to phones and tablets a wide new application space will be opened up. With WebClip we present a device offering digital and analogue I/O ports that can be controlled and monitored by just clipping the device onto a capacitive touch screen. A web page in the browser of the touch screen device is used to control the bi-directional communication. Data from the WebClip to the device is sent by emulating touches on the screen whereas the reverse direction uses light sensors on the bottom side of the clip to receive light sequences emitted by the web page. A simple Javascript API is offered to build custom web applications. We have successfully tested our prototype with a variety of phones and tablet computers and report on performance and limitations.

Supplementary Material

ZIP File (ubi1499n.zip)
Auxiliary Material for the UbiComp 2013 submission: WebClip: A Connector for Ubiquitous Physical Input and Output for Touch Screen Devices Thomas Kubitza, Norman Pohl, Tilman Dingler, Albrecht Schmidt Content: The auxiliary material includes schematics as well as Eagle source files for the easy recreation of the WebClip device. Please note that the proposed hardware design is part of an ongoing optimization an miniaturization process. Please contact the authors for a most recent version of the hardware design. Because of the rapidly changing nature of software, no software or firmware is included in this package. Please contact the authors to obtain the latest version of the necessary software package. Contact: {firstname.lastname}@vis.uni-stuttgart.de

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Cited By

View all
  • (2019)Touchscreen tags based on thin-film electronics for the Internet of EverythingNature Electronics10.1038/s41928-019-0333-z2:12(606-611)Online publication date: 16-Dec-2019
  • (2018)Designing finger orientation input for mobile touchscreensProceedings of the 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services10.1145/3229434.3229444(1-9)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2018
  • (2015)ShapeClipProceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2702123.2702599(19-28)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2015
  • Show More Cited By

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  1. WebClip: a connector for ubiquitous physical input and output for touch screen devices

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    UbiComp '13: Proceedings of the 2013 ACM international joint conference on Pervasive and ubiquitous computing
    September 2013
    846 pages
    ISBN:9781450317702
    DOI:10.1145/2493432
    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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    Publication History

    Published: 08 September 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. light/touch communication
    2. phone peripherals
    3. touch screen

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    UbiComp '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 92 of 394 submissions, 23%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 764 of 2,912 submissions, 26%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2019)Touchscreen tags based on thin-film electronics for the Internet of EverythingNature Electronics10.1038/s41928-019-0333-z2:12(606-611)Online publication date: 16-Dec-2019
    • (2018)Designing finger orientation input for mobile touchscreensProceedings of the 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services10.1145/3229434.3229444(1-9)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2018
    • (2015)ShapeClipProceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2702123.2702599(19-28)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2015
    • (2015)IS-EUD 2015 Studio: Exploring End User Programming of Interactive SpacesEnd-User Development10.1007/978-3-319-18425-8_30(283-286)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2015
    • (2015)Towards a Toolkit for the Rapid Creation of Smart EnvironmentsEnd-User Development10.1007/978-3-319-18425-8_21(230-235)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2015

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