Acoustruments: Passive, Acoustically-Driven, Interactive Controls for Handheld Devices

Acoustruments are low-cost, passive, and powerless mechanisms, made from plastic, that can bring rich, tangible functionality to handheld devices. Through a structured exploration, we identified an expansive vocabulary of design primitives, providing building blocks for the construction of tangible interfaces utilizing smartphones’ existing audio functionality. By combining design primitives, familiar physical mechanisms can all be constructed. On top of these, we can create end-user applications with rich, tangible interactive functionalities. Acoustruments add a new method to the toolbox HCI practitioners and researchers can draw upon, while introducing a cheap and passive method for adding interactive controls to consumer products. Published at CHI 2015.


Research Team: Gierad Laput, Eric Brockmeyer, Scott E. Hudson, and Chris Harrison

Awards: Best Paper Award

Citation

Gierad Laput, Eric Brockmeyer, Scott E. Hudson, and Chris Harrison. 2015. Acoustruments: Passive, Acoustically-Driven, Interactive Controls for Handheld Devices. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2161–2170. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702414

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