Sensurfaces: A Novel Approach for Embedded Touch Sensing on Everyday Surfaces

Fig. 1. Sensurfaces is a tool for prototyping sensing surfaces with a large variety of materials (1). Sensurfaces allows to transform common surfaces like walls (2) or furniture (3) into touch sensing surfaces. Sensurfaces is composed of an electronic board (4) and an interface software for easy prototyping and high customization.

Ubiquitous touch sensing surfaces are largely influenced by touchscreens' look and feel and fail to express the physical richness of existing surrounding materials. We introduce Sensurfaces, a plug-and-play electronic module that allows to rapidly experiment with touch-sensitive surfaces while preserving the original appearance of materials. Sensurfaces is composed of plug-and-play modules that can be connected together to expand the size and number of materials composing a sensitive surface. The combination of Sensurfaces modules allows the creation of small or large multi-material sensitive surfaces that can detect multi-touch but also body proximity, pose, pass, or even human steps. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of Sensurfaces. We propose a design space describing the factors of Sensurfaces interfaces. Then, through a series of technical evaluations, we demonstrate the capabilities of our system. Finally, we report on two workshops validating the usability of our system.

CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Ubiquitous and mobile computing systems and tools; Touch screens.