Morten Fjeld visiting

On his way from Eindhoven to Zurich Morten Fjeld was visiting our group. It was great to catch up and talk about a number of exciting research projects and ideas. Some years ago one of my students from Munich did his final project with Morten working on haptic communication ideas, see [1]. Last year at TEI Morten had a paper on a related project - also using actuated sliders, see [2].

In his presentation Morten gave an overview of the research he does and we found a joint interest in capacitive sensing. Raphael Wimmer did his final project in Munich on capacitive sensing for embedded interaction which was published in Percom 2007, see [3]. Raphael has continued the work for more details and the open source hardware and software see http://capsense.org. Morten has a cool paper (combing a keyboard and capacitive sensing) at Interact 2009 - so check the program when it is out.

We talked about interaction and optical tracking and that reminded me that we wanted to see how useful the touchless SDK (http://www.codeplex.com/touchless) could be for final projects and exercise. Matthias Kranz had used it successfully with students in Linz in the unconventional user interfaces class.

[1] Jenaro, J., Shahrokni, A., Schrittenloher, and M., Fjeld, M. 2007. One-Dimensional Force Feedback Slider: Digital platform. In Proc. Workshop at the IEEE Virtual Reality 2007 Conference: Mixed Reality User Interfaces: Specification, Authoring, Adaptation (MRUI07), 47-51

[2] Gabriel, R., Sandsjö, J., Shahrokni, A., and Fjeld, M. 2008. BounceSlider: actuated sliders for music performance and composition. In Proceedings of the 2nd international Conference on Tangible and Embedded interaction (Bonn, Germany, February 18 - 20, 2008). TEI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 127-130. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1347390.1347418

[3] Wimmer, R., Kranz, M., Boring, S., and Schmidt, A. 2007. A Capacitive Sensing Toolkit for Pervasive Activity Detection and Recognition. In Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE international Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (March 19 - 23, 2007). PERCOM. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 171-180. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/PERCOM.2007.1