Conductive Inkjet Printed Passive 2D TrackPad for VR Interaction

PubDate: October 2018

Teams: University of Wisconsin-Madison,University of California San Diego

Writers: Chuhan Gao;Xinyu Zhang;Suman Banerjee

PDF: Conductive Inkjet Printed Passive 2D TrackPad for VR Interaction

Abstract

Mobile virtual reality (VR) headsets, such as Google Cardboard and Samsung GearVR, can reuse a smartphone as near-eye display to create immersive experience. But such devices barely support any user interaction, even for simple tasks such as menu selection and single-character input. In this paper, we design Inkput, a simple passive interface attached to the unexploited backside of the headset to enable touch sensing. Inkput is a piece of paper substrate with carbon ink patterns printed atop. It leverages the column of electrodes near the edge of the smartphone touchscreen to sense multi-touch on the 2D space, and is even able to locate finger hovering. Our experiments demonstrate that Inkput can precisely detect touch positions with mm-level precision. Our case studies in actual VR applications also verify that Inkput can support common VR interactions and can even outperform high-end handheld controllers in terms of efficiency.