SmartSkin

TLDR

Unlike camera‑based gesture systems, this approach integrates all sensing elements into the surface, avoiding lighting and occlusion issues. The paper introduces a sensor architecture for gesture‑sensitive interactive surfaces and presents two prototype systems—a table‑size and a tablet‑size implementation. The architecture uses capacitive sensing with a mesh‑shaped antenna to detect hand positions, shapes, and distance, enabling interaction techniques that are hard to achieve with other designs.

Abstract

This paper introduces a new sensor architecture for making interactive surfaces that are sensitive to human hand and finger gestures. This sensor recognizes multiple hand positions and shapes and calculates the distance between the hand and the surface by using capacitive sensing and a mesh-shaped antenna. In contrast to camera-based gesture recognition systems, all sensing elements can be integrated within the surface, and this method does not suffer from lighting and occlusion problems. This paper describes the sensor architecture, as well as two working prototype systems: a table-size system and a tablet-size system. It also describes several interaction techniques that would be difficult to perform without using this architecture