We decided to use the open source multi-touch kit and purchased the parts needed for the kit.
We also brainstormed on how to integrate the technology into our fabric book in a specific scenario. We decided to extend on the Jellycat If I were a Puppy Board Book and integrate digital tactile inputs, digital outputs(sound, lights, and haptic) with materials of different tactile experiences(rubbery, velvety, furry, and etc.). Below is a sketch of what we envision.
One thing we discussed was that this multi-touch kit enables gesture recognition, which is something we want to take advantage of. We also didn’t want to make a fabric touch screen, we decided to focus on the properties of touches. For example, puppies don’t generally like a rapid swipe. Gentile touches are preferred over hard presses. Feedbacks of the puppy’s preference will be delivered through digital feedback.
There are also possibilities in mapping different sound properties to the location of touches, but we want to first focus on properties of touches/swipes.
For this week, our parts should be arriving soon, and we will be playing with the multi-touch kit and each creates our first version of a multi-touch sensor. We plan to use conductive tape and/or conductive fabric for the first prototype.
Narjes Pourjafarian, Anusha Withana, Joseph A. Paradiso, and Jürgen Steimle. 2019. Multi-Touch Kit: A Do-It-Yourself Technique for Capacitive Multi-Touch Sensing Using a Commodity Microcontroller. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1071–1083. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3332165.3347895