Augmenting touch interaction through acoustic sensing

Recognizing how a person actually touches a surface has generated a strong interest within the interactive surfaces com-munity. Although we agree that touch is the main source of information, unless other cues are accounted for, user inten-tion might not be accurately recognized. We propose to ex-pand the expressiveness of touch interfaces by augmenting touch with acoustic sensing. In our vision, users can natu-rally express different actions by touching the surface with different body parts, such as fingers, knuckles, fingernails, punches, and so forth- not always distinguishable by touch technologies but recognized by acoustic sensing. Our con-tribution is the integration of touch and sound to expand the input language of surface interaction. ACMClassification: H5.2 [Information interfaces and pre