We introduce I/O Braid, an interactive textile cord with embedded sensing and visual feedback. I/O Braid senses proximity, touch, and twist through a spiraling, repeating braiding topology of touch matrices. This sensing topology is uniquely scalable, requiring only a few sensing lines to cover the whole length of a cord. The same topology allows us to embed fiber optic strands to integrate co-located visual feedback. We provide an overview of the enabling braiding techniques, design considerations, and approaches to gesture detection. These allow us to derive a set of interaction techniques, which we demonstrate with different form factors and capabilities. Our applications illustrate how I/O Braid can invisibly augment everyday objects, such as touch-sensitive headphones and interactive drawstrings on garments, while enabling discoverability and feedback through embedded light sources.

References

Alex Olwal, Jon Moeller, Greg Priest-Dorman, Thad Starner, and Ben Carroll. 2018. I/O Braid: Scalable Touch-Sensitive Lighted Cords Using Spiraling, Repeating Sensing Textiles and Fiber Optics. In Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 485-497. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3242587.3242638