Scott Saponas

Always-Available Mobile Interaction Survey Article

Dan Morris (opens in new tab), Desney Tan (opens in new tab), and I put together an article on Emerging Input Technologies for Always-Available Mobile Interaction. Our article outlines the idea of Always-Available interaction in mobile settings. We also provide a survey of input and output technologies that are relevant to this domain.

Pocket Touch

At UIST 2011, we presented our PocketTouch paper . In this work, Chris Harrison (opens in new tab), Hrvoje Benko (opens in new tab), and I tackled creating a capacitive-touch based input device that can work through fabrics. Our goal is to enable phones and other mobile devices to accept gesture and handwriting input without removing those devices from their pocket, bag, or case.

Anne Eisenberg wrote a kind article on PocketTouch in the New York Times (opens in new tab).

Wireless Muscle Computer Interface with Dry Electrodes

We presented our note Making Muscle-Computer Interfaces More Practical (opens in new tab) in the Brains and Brawn session (opens in new tab) at CHI 2010 (opens in new tab) in Atlanta, GA. This note builds on our previous work in muscle-computer interfaces by tackling the challenges of creating sensing hardware suitable for mobile and off-desktop environments, electrodes that can be put on quickly without adhesives or gel, and gesture recognition techniques that require no new training or calibration after re-donning a muscle-sensing armband.

Tongue-Computer Input

At UIST 2009 (opens in new tab) in beautiful Victoria (opens in new tab), we presented our Tech Note on our new work prototyping new methods for Tongue-Computer Input. Check out the video below. It is an excerpt from our talk on a new tongue-based input technique. It shows my colleague Dan playing tetris with a wired version of our device. We also have demonstrated the ability to control a motorized chair from our tongue input device. Our latest version of the device is a wireless orthodontic-like retainer.

 Playing Guitar Hero (and other examples of Muscle-Computer Input)

At UIST 2009 (opens in new tab) We presented our paper on Muscle-Computer Input . In this work, we are exploring directly using muscles for input in situations (such as carrying objects) where normal physical input devices are inconvient or impossible to use. Kate Greene (opens in new tab) of the MIT Technology Review (opens in new tab) wrote up an article about our work on Muscle-Computer Interfaces (opens in new tab). She discusses our approach to muscle-sensing for computer input and our paper at UIST 2009.

Following Johhny Lee (opens in new tab)‘s post to his Procrastineering Blog (opens in new tab) about the video figure (shown below) (opens in new tab) from our paper at UIST 2009, the following websites picked up the story: ACM TechNews (opens in new tab), Engadget (opens in new tab), Gizmodo (opens in new tab), Joystiq (opens in new tab), Kotaku (opens in new tab), LiveScience (opens in new tab), Makezine (opens in new tab), Popular Science (opens in new tab), Slashdot (opens in new tab), and TechRadar (opens in new tab). For a longer clip of the Guitar Hero demo, here is a video of me playing Air Guitar Hero (opens in new tab). All versions on YouTube: mine (opens in new tab), CHI (opens in new tab), and TechFlash (opens in new tab).

Muscle-Computer Input + Interactive Tabletops = Awesome

We have a paper combining muscle sensing and the Microsoft Surface at the Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces 2009 (opens in new tab) conference. Check out our video (opens in new tab) to see our interaction techniques in action!

Muscle-Computer Input

Check out our CHI 2008 paper (opens in new tab) with Desney Tan (opens in new tab), Dan Morris (opens in new tab), & Ravin Balakrishnan (opens in new tab) on Muscle-Computer Interfaces at CHI (opens in new tab). New Scientist (opens in new tab) and the blogosphere (opens in new tab) gave this work some great coverage.

Our work on Muscle-Computer Interfaces was mentioned in an article in Forbes Magazine (opens in new tab) by Lee Gomes (opens in new tab). His article describes the importance of the keyboard and mouse in our everyday lives and some of the alternative input approaches researchers have explored.

Dr. Bill Crounse, senior director of worldwide health at Microsoft (opens in new tab), stopped by Microsoft Research (opens in new tab) and interviewed several people, including me, about our current research. He wrote and spoke about our work on Muscle-Computer Input in his Health Blog (opens in new tab) and on Microsoft’s Channel 10 (opens in new tab).