This year I attended the UIST conference where I presented our first paper on InterruptMe. It was a very intensive conference I had loads of fun, and met with many interesting people. As I knew I was going to attend anyway I decided to join the student competition, and formed a group together with my colleagues Morten Esbensen and Magdalena Kogutowska.

The problem was “do something cool with the new Microsoft Touch Mouse”. Our proposal was to build a little casing for the mouse, so that it’s multitouch surface could handle multiple inputs (touches) guided to it through wires. This capability together with the wireless communication of the different touches by the mouse and the batteries makes it perfect for rapid prototyping of tangibles.

You can find the guide, the API, and other material here: http://itu.dk/people/mortenq/loki/index.html

The results: we won the first place on the best implementation category.

Resources

• Hincapié-Ramos, J.D., Esbensen, M. and Kogutowska, M. 2011. Rapid Prototyping of Tangibles with a Capacitive Mouse. In Proc. DHRS ’11. Copenhagen Business School. [pdf (6.6MB)]