The small physical size of wearable devices limits the user experience, preventing full engagement with wearable technology compared to smartphones, tablets, or laptops. Since user-device interaction is currently dominated by touch-based methods, the size of the touchscreen relative to the finger imposes significant restrictions on the interaction. There is a need to extend the input to a larger space that has the potential to support a rich set of input gestures.

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To address the input challenge of wearable devices, we introduced SoundTrak, an active acoustic sensing technique that can track the finger’s position in 3D space with a mean euclidean distance of 1.305 cm in a volume of 3520 cm3 using four MEMS microphones and one speaker. The four microphones are mounted on the smartwatch or any wearable device and the speaker is worn as a ring by the user. The speaker on the ring emits a certains frequency which is captured by the set of microphones and by using the phase values of the received signal, the position of the finger can be found.

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In a team of five, I was involved with most aspects of the projects and helped to shape a vague concept into a working prototype. While working on various aspects of the project like building a realtime system with  hardware interfacing low level code, 3D printing, electronics, system evaluation, video production, etc I learnt about acoustics and its possible application into HCI and related technology. This project will be presented in Ubicomp 17 conference.

Tags:

Wearables, Acoustics, HCI, Smartwatch, Google Glass