What Caused That Touch? Expressive Interaction with a Surface through Fiduciary-Tagged Gloves

Abstract

The hand has incredible potential as an expressive input device. Yet most touch technologies imprecisely recognize limited hand parts (if at all), usually by inferring the hand part from the touch shapes. We introduce the fiduciary-tagged glove as a reliable, inexpensive, and very expressive way to gather input about: (a) many parts of a hand (fingertips, knuckles, palms, sides, backs of the hand), and (b) to discriminate between one person's or multiple peoples' hands. Examples illustrate the interaction power gained by being able to identify and exploit these various hand parts.