The skweezee system: enabling the design and the programming of squeeze interactions

Abstract

The Skweezee System is an easy, flexible and open system for designing and developing squeeze-based, gestural interactions. It consists of Skweezees, which are soft objects, filled with conductive padding, that can be deformed or squeezed by applying pressure. These objects contain a number of electrodes that are dispersed over the shape. The electrodes sense the shape shifting of the conductive filling by measuring the changing resistance between every possible pair of electrodes. In addition, the Skweezee System contains user-friendly software that allows end-users to define and to record their own squeeze gestures. These gestures are distinguished using a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. In this paper we introduce the concept and the underlying technology of the Skweezee System and we demonstrate the robustness of the SVM based classifier via two experimental user studies. The results of these studies demonstrate accuracies of 81% (8 gestures, user-defined) to 97% (3 gestures, user-defined), with an accuracy of 90% for 7 pre-defined gestures.