Wearable, untethered hands tracking with passive magnets

Abstract

Accurate tracking of the hands and fingers allows users to employ natural gestures in various interactive applications, e.g., controller-free interaction in augmented reality. Hand tracking also supports health applications, such as monitoring face-touching, a common vector for infectious disease. However, for both types of applications, the utility of hand tracking is often limited by the impracticality of bulky tethered systems (e.g., instrumented gloves) or inherent limitations (e.g., Line of Sight or privacy concerns with vision-based systems). These limitations have severely restricted the adoption of hand tracking in real-world applications. We demonstrate MagX, a fully untethered on-body hand tracking system utilizing passive magnets and a novel magnetic sensing platform. Since passive magnets require no maintenance, they can be worn on the hands indefinitely, and only the sensor board needs recharging, akin to a smartwatch.