This work develops a system of spherical magnetic tangibles, GaussMarbles, that exploits the unique affordances of spherical tangibles for interacting with portable physical constraints. The proposed design of each magnetic sphere includes a magnetic polyhedron in the center. The magnetic polyhedron provides bi-polar magnetic fields, which are expanded in equal dihedral angles as robust features for tracking, allowing an analog Hall-sensor grid to resolve the near-surface 3D position accurately in real-time. Possible interactions between the magnetic spheres and portable physical constraints in various levels of embodiment were explored using several example applications.
@inproceedings{Kuo:2016:GSM:2858036.2858559,
author = {Kuo, Han-Chih and Liang, Rong-Hao and Lin, Long-Fei and Chen, Bing-Yu},
title = {GaussMarbles: Spherical Magnetic Tangibles for Interacting with Portable Physical Constraints},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
series = {CHI '16},
year = {2016},
isbn = {978-1-4503-3362-7},
location = {Santa Clara, California, USA},
pages = {4228--4232},
numpages = {5},
url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2858036.2858559},
doi = {10.1145/2858036.2858559},
acmid = {2858559},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
keywords = {analog hall-sensor grid, gausssense, magnetic tangibles, physical constraints},
}