VibRing: Disambiguating Touch with a Smart-Ring

Capacitive touchscreens have transformed user interaction by enabling intuitive multi-finger input. However, existing touchscreens cannot differentiate between individual fingers or users, limiting the expressiveness of touch input.

VibRing proposes augmenting touchscreen interaction with a smart ring that transmits a unique identifier through vibration patterns when in contact with the screen. This enables the system to distinguish between users and assign different meanings to touches. The paper explores this concept and presents example applications demonstrating its feasibility and potential to enrich multi-user and multi-touch interaction.

@inproceedings{10.1145/3041164.3041196,
   author = {Bianchi, Andrea and Je, Seungwoo},
   title = {Disambiguating touch with a smart-ring},
   year = {2017},
   isbn = {9781450348355},
   publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
   address = {New York, NY, USA},
   url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3041164.3041196},
   doi = {10.1145/3041164.3041196},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the 8th Augmented Human International Conference},
   articleno = {27},
   numpages = {5},
   keywords = {wearable, touch disambiguation, smart-ring, augmentation},
   location = {Silicon Valley, California, USA},
   series = {AH '17}
}