skip to main content
10.1145/2556288.2557120acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageschiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

SurfaceLink: using inertial and acoustic sensing to enable multi-device interaction on a surface

Published: 26 April 2014 Publication History

Abstract

We present SurfaceLink, a system where users can make natural surface gestures to control association and information transfer among a set of devices that are placed on a mutually shared surface (e.g., a table). SurfaceLink uses a combination of on-device accelerometers, vibration motors, speakers and microphones (and, optionally, an off-device contact microphone for greater sensitivity) to sense gestures performed on the shared surface. In a controlled evaluation with 10 participants, SurfaceLink detected the presence of devices on the same surface with 97.7% accuracy, their relative arrangement with 89.4% accuracy, and various single- and multi-touch surface gestures with an average accuracy of 90.3%. A usability analysis showed that SurfaceLink has advantages over current multi-device interaction techniques in a number of situations.

Supplementary Material

suppl.mov (pn0896-file3.mp4)
Supplemental video
MP4 File (p1387-sidebyside.mp4)

References

[1]
Arentz, W. A. and Bandara, U. Near ultrasonic directional data transfer for modern smartphones. Proc. UbiComp'11.
[2]
Balfanz, D., Smetters, D. K., Stewart, P., and Wong, H. C. Talking To Strangers: Authentication in Ad-Hoc Wireless Networks.
[3]
Butler, A., Izadi, S., and Hodges, S. SideSight: Multi-"touch" interaction around small devices. Proc. UIST'08.
[4]
Crevoisier, A. and Polotti, P. Tangible acoustic Interfaces and their applications for the design of new musical instruments. Proc. Nime'05.
[5]
Cuypers, T., Francken, Y., Vanaken, C., Reeth, F. V., and Bekaert, P. Smartphone localization on interactive surfaces using the built-in camera. Proc. Procams'09.
[6]
Dearman, D., Guy, R. T., and Truong, K. N. Determining the orientation of proximate mobile devices using their back facing camera. Proc. CHI'12.
[7]
Goel, M., Wobbrock, J. O., and Patel, S. N. GripSense: Using built-in sensors to detect hand posture and pressure on commodity mobile phones. Proc. UIST'12.
[8]
Harrison, C. and Hudson, S. E. Scratch Input: Creating Large, Inexpensive, Unpowered and Mobile Finger Input Surfaces. Proc. UIST'08.
[9]
Harrison, C. and Hudson, S. E. Lightweight Material Detection for Placement-Aware Mobile Computing. Proc. UIST'08.
[10]
Harrison, C., Schwarz, J., and Hudson, S. E. TapSense: Enhancing finger interaction on touch surfaces. Proc. UIST'11.
[11]
Harrison, C., Xiao, R., and Hudson, S. E. Acoustic Barcodes: Passive, Durable and Inexpensive Notched Identification Tags. Proc. UIST'12.
[12]
Hart, S. G. Nasa-Task Load Index (NASA-TLX); 20 Years Later. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting 50, 9 (2006).
[13]
Hinckley, K., Ramos, G., Guimbretiere, F., Baudisch, P., and Smith, M. Stitching: Pen Gestures that Span Multiple Displays. Proc. AVI'04.
[14]
Hinckley, K. and Ramos, G. Cooperative Stitching: Spontaneous Wireless Connections for Small Co-Located Groups (TECHNOTE).
[15]
Holmquist, L.E., Mattern, F., Schiele, B., Alahuhta, P., Beigl, M., and Gellersen, H.-w. Smart-Its Friends: A Technique for Users to Easily Establish Connections between Smart Artefacts. Proc. UbiComp'01.
[16]
Hutama, W., Song, P., Fu, C.-W., and Goh, W. B. Distinguishing multiple smart-phone interactions on a multi-touch wall display using tilt correlation. Proc. CHI'11.
[17]
Kane, S. K., Avrahami, D., Wobbrock, J. O., et al. Bonfire: A Nomadic System for Hybrid Laptop-Tabletop Interaction. Proc. UIST'09.
[18]
Kortuem, G., Kray, C., and Gellersen, H. Sensing and visualizing spatial relations of mobile devices. Proc. UIST'05.
[19]
Kunze, K. and Lukowicz, P. Symbolic Object Localization Through Active Sampling of Acceleration and Sound Signatures. Proc. UbiComp'07.
[20]
Lopes, P., Jota, R., and Jorge, J. A. Augmenting touch interaction through acoustic sensing. Proc. ITS'11.
[21]
Lucero, A., Holopainen, J., and Jokela, T. Pass-Them-Around: Collaborative Use of Mobile Phones for Photo Sharing. Proc. CHI'11.
[22]
Lucero, A., Jokela, T., Palin, A., Aaltonen, V., and Nikara, J. EasyGroups: Binding Mobile Devices for Collaborative Interactions. Proc. CHI'12 (WIP).
[23]
Matsushita, N. and Rekimoto, J. HoloWall: Designing a Finger, Hand, Body, and Object Sensitive Wall. Proc. UIST'97.
[24]
Mayrhofer, R. and Gellersen, H. Shake Well Before Use: Authentication Based on Accelerometer Data. Proc. Pervasive'07.
[25]
Murray-Smith, R., Williamson, J., Hughes, S., and Quaade, T. Stane: Synthesized Surfaces for Tactile Input. Proc. CHI'08.
[26]
Paradiso, J. A., Leo, C. K., Checka, N., and Hsiao, K. Passive acoustic sensing for tracking knocks atop large interactive displays. Proc. IEEE Sensors 2002.
[27]
Ramos, G., Hinckley, K., Wilson, A., and Sarin, R. Synchronous Gestures in Multi-Display Environments. Human-Computer Interaction, Special Issue: Ubiquitous Multi-Display Environments 24, 1-2 (2009).
[28]
Rekimoto, J. and Saitoh, M. Augmented Surfaces: A Spatially Continuous Work Space for Hybrid Computing Environments. Proc. CHI'99.
[29]
Schmidt, D., Chehimi, F., Rukzio, E., and Gellersen, H. PhoneTouch: A Technique for Direct Phone Interaction on Surfaces. Proc. UIST'10.
[30]
Seniuk, A. and Blostein, D. Pen Acoustic Emissions for Text and Gesture Recognition. 10th Int'l Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (2009).
[31]
Thiel, B., Kloch, K., and Lukowicz, P. Sound-based proximity detection with mobile phones. Proc. PhoneSense'12.
[32]
Wilson, A. D. and Sarin, R. BlueTable: Connecting Wireless Mobile Devices on Interactive Surfaces Using Vision-Based Handshaking. Proc. GI'07.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)KeyFlow: Acoustic Motion Sensing for Cursor Control on Any KeyboardAdjunct Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3672539.3686348(1-3)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
  • (2024)MAF: Exploring Mobile Acoustic Field for Hand-to-Face Gesture InteractionsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642437(1-20)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2023)SAWSense: Using Surface Acoustic Waves for Surface-bound Event RecognitionProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580991(1-18)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. SurfaceLink: using inertial and acoustic sensing to enable multi-device interaction on a surface

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 2014
      4206 pages
      ISBN:9781450324731
      DOI:10.1145/2556288
      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]

      Sponsors

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 26 April 2014

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. acoustic sensing
      2. inertial sensing
      3. mobile phones
      4. multi-device interaction
      5. surface interaction

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article

      Conference

      CHI '14
      Sponsor:
      CHI '14: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 26 - May 1, 2014
      Ontario, Toronto, Canada

      Acceptance Rates

      CHI '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 465 of 2,043 submissions, 23%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

      Upcoming Conference

      CHI 2025
      ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 26 - May 1, 2025
      Yokohama , Japan

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)30
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)5
      Reflects downloads up to 01 Mar 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all
      • (2024)KeyFlow: Acoustic Motion Sensing for Cursor Control on Any KeyboardAdjunct Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3672539.3686348(1-3)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
      • (2024)MAF: Exploring Mobile Acoustic Field for Hand-to-Face Gesture InteractionsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642437(1-20)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
      • (2023)SAWSense: Using Surface Acoustic Waves for Surface-bound Event RecognitionProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580991(1-18)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
      • (2023)Surface-Assisted In-Air Gesture Recognition2023 14th International Conference on Information and Communication Technology Convergence (ICTC)10.1109/ICTC58733.2023.10392389(666-668)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2023
      • (2023)Smatable: A Vibration-Based Sensing Method for Making Ordinary Tables Touch-InterfacesIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.334350011(142611-142627)Online publication date: 2023
      • (2022)A Secure and Reliable Mobile Authentication Alternative Utilizing Hand Structure2022 IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference (URTC)10.1109/URTC56832.2022.10002184(1-5)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2022
      • (2022)Fine-Grained Vibration Based Sensing Using a SmartphoneIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2021.306767921:11(3971-3985)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2022
      • (2022)Scanning the Voice of Your Fingerprint With Everyday SurfacesIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2021.304921721:8(3024-3040)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2022
      • (2020)Proxemics Beyond ProximityProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376379(1-14)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
      • (2019)A device binding method based on content illumination pattern in public display environmentsPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.021449314:5(e0214493)Online publication date: 10-May-2019
      • Show More Cited By

      View Options

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Figures

      Tables

      Media

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media