TZee: Exploiting the Lighting Properties of Multi-touch Tabletops for Tangible 3D Interactions

Abstract

Manipulating 3D objects on a tabletop is inherently problematic. Tabletops lack a third degree of freedom and thus require novel solutions to support even the simplest 3D manipulations. Our solution is TZee – a passive tangible widget that enables natural interactions with 3D objects by exploiting the lighting properties of diffuse illumination (DI) multitouch tabletops. TZee is assembled from stacked layers of acrylic glass to extend the tabletop’s infrared light slightly above the surface without supplemental power. With TZee, users can intuitively scale, translate and rotate objects in all three dimensions, and also perform more sophisticated gestures, like “slicing” a volumetric object, that have not been possible with existing tabletop interaction schemes. TZee is built with affordable and accessible materials, and one tabletop surface can easily support multiple TZees. Moreover, since TZee is transparent, there are numerous possibilities to augment interactions with feedback, helpful hints, or other visual enhancements. We discuss several important design considerations and demonstrate the value of TZee with several applications.

Video

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Publisher Link

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979143

Citation

Cary Williams, Xing-Dong Yang, Grant Partridge, Joshua Usiskin-Miller, Arkady Major and Pourang Irani. 2011. TZee: Exploiting the Lighting Properties of Multi-touch Tabletops for Tangible 3D Interactions. In Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI 2011). Vancouver, BC. ACM, 1363-1372.

Bibtext Entry

@INPROCEEDINGS { TZee2011,
    AUTHOR = { Cary Williams and Xing-Dong Yang and Grant Partridge and Joshua Usiskin-Miller and Arkady Major and Pourang Irani },
    TITLE = { TZee: Exploiting the Lighting Properties of Multi-touch Tabletops for Tangible 3D Interactions },
    BOOKTITLE = { Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI 2011) },
    YEAR = { 2011 },
    PAGES = { 1363--1372 },
    DOI = { 10.1145/1978942.1979143 },
    PUBLISHER = { ACM },
    ADDRESS = { Vancouver, BC },
}