Sensurfaces

Abstract

Ubiquitous touch sensing surfaces are largely influenced by touchscreens' look and feel and fail to express the physical richness of existing surrounding materials. We introduce Sensurfaces, a plug-and-play electronic module that allows to rapidly experiment with touch-sensitive surfaces while preserving the original appearance of materials. Sensurfaces is composed of plug-and-play modules that can be connected together to expand the size and number of materials composing a sensitive surface. The combination of Sensurfaces modules allows the creation of small or large multi-material sensitive surfaces that can detect multi-touch but also body proximity, pose, pass, or even human steps. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of Sensurfaces. We propose a design space describing the factors of Sensurfaces interfaces. Then, through a series of technical evaluations, we demonstrate the capabilities of our system. Finally, we report on two workshops validating the usability of our system.