Pulp Nonfiction: Low-Cost Touch Tracking for Paper

Paper continues to be a versatile and indispensable material in the 21st century. Of course, paper is a passive medium with no inherent interactivity, precluding us from computationally-enhancing a wide variety of paper-based activities. In this work, we present a new approach for bringing the digital and paper worlds closer together, specifically by enabling paper to track finger input and also drawn input with writing implements. Importantly, for paper to still be considered paper, our method had to be very low cost. This necessitated much research into materials, fabrication methods and sensing techniques. We describe the outcome of our investigations and show that our novel method can be sufficiently low-cost and accurate to enable new interactive opportunities with this pervasive material.