ThickPad: a hover-tracking touchpad for a laptop
Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM symposium adjunct on User interface software and technology
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We present a new type of augmented mechanical keyboard, capable of sensing rich and expressive motion gestures performed both on and directly above the device. Our hardware comprises of low-resolution matrix of infrared (IR) proximity sensors interspersed between the keys of a regular mechanical keyboard. This results in coarse but high frame-rate motion data. We extend a machine learning algorithm, traditionally used for static classification only, to robustly support dynamic, temporal gestures. We propose the use of motion signatures a technique that utilizes pairs of motion history images and a random forest based classifier to robustly recognize a large set of motion gestures on and directly above the keyboard. Our technique achieves a mean per-frame classification accuracy of 75.6% in leave-one-subject-out and 89.9% in half-test/half-training cross-validation. We detail our hardware and gesture recognition algorithm, provide performance and accuracy numbers, and demonstrate a large set of gestures designed to be performed with our device. We conclude with qualitative feedback from users, discussion of limitations and areas for future work.