Grip-Ball: A spherical multi-touch interface for interacting with virtual worlds

Abstract

Graspable user interface (UI) is a useful method for interacting with virtual world. It allows users to hold and manipulate a device intuitively for manipulating virtual 3D objects. In this paper, we propose Grip-Ball as graspable UI, which is a spherical shaped device based upon capacitive multi-touch sensing. User's grip pattern can be recognized by measuring grip touch on the surface of the device. In the study, we define 5 hand-grip patterns of the Grip-Ball according to user's purpose (platform, power-grip and precise-grip) and number of hand (one-handed grip, two-handed grip). An accuracy of up to 98% could be achieved for hand grip recognition.