Enabling Tangible Interaction on Non-touch Displays with Optical Mouse Sensor and Visible Light Communication

This paper presents Centaur, an input system that enables tangible interaction on displays, e.g., untouchable computer monitors. Centaur’s tangibles are built from low-cost optical mouse sensors, or can alternatively be emulated by commercial optical mice already available. They are trackable when put on the display, rendering a real-time and high-precision tangible interface. Even for ordinary personal computers, enabling Centaur requires no new hardware and installation burden. Centaur’s cost-effectiveness and wide availability open up new opportunities for tangible user interface (TUI) users and practitioners. Centaur’s key innovation lies in its tracking method. It embeds high-frequency light signals into different portions of the display content as location beacons. When the tangibles are put on the screen, they are able to sense the light signals with their optical mouse sensors, and thus determine the locations accordingly. We develop four applications to showcase the potential usage of Centaur.