Reinventing Touch with Body Channel Communication - System Design from Electric Fields To Mixed Reality

Abstract

Even though capacitive touchscreens represent nowadays a prevalent technology, Body Channel Communication (BCC) is relatively unknown – nevertheless, these two technologies share the same core idea. Both concepts work with weak electric signals and rely on the capacity of the human body to act as a conductor. However, while touchscreens work with the disrupted signals at the place of origin, BCC proposes to employ the human body as carrier medium for digital communication purposes in a tangible interaction setup. In fact, BCC reinvents touch interactions by augmenting its user’s touch events with digital content. When a person holds two BCC-enabled objects in her/his hands, she/he creates a physical transmission path between them, which allows general data transmission between those devices. The user naturally controls that data transmission by simply touching or releasing the objects. BCC holds various exciting opportunities for the future generation of applications in terms of interactivity or simply as a communication alternative. Yet, the exact prerequisites, operating conditions, and possibilities of using BCC on application level have not been explored. Opposed to most work in the space, this dissertation is not primarily concerned with the BCC transmission mechanism itself, but is motivated by the vision of having BCC as an accessible component in complex end-user application design. In order to take a leap forward towards this vision, we propose a systematic breakdown of the problem space. By following a typical network stack approach, we can analyze separately the channel, the base system requirements, various networking concepts, and eventually, application level integration – all while keeping not just the common objective in mind, but also building an understanding how each of these layers affect each other.