Human environments are physically supported by floors, which prevents people and furniture from falling against gravitational pull. Since our body motions continuously generate vibrations and loads that propagate to the ground, measurement of these expressive signals leads to unobtrusive activity sensing. In this study, we present Flexel, a modular floor interface for room-scale tactile sensing. By paving a room with floor interfaces, our system can immediately begin to infer touch positions, track user locations, recognize foot gestures, and detect object locations. Through a series of exploratory studies, we figured out the preferable hardware design that adheres to construction conventions, as well as the optimal sensor density that mediates the trade-off between costs and performance. In addition, we summarize a design guideline that is generalizable to other floor interfaces. Moreover, we demonstrate example applications for room-scale tactile sensing enabled by Flexel systems.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3526113.3545699
The ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology