Touch Cube

A new interface for interactions with data in Virtual Reality

The Touch Cube is a prototype interface device that consists of 5 square track pads arranged within a cube. The device also contains a 9 axis Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to measure the orientation and movement of it and a Bluetooth enabled microcontroller to transmit the movement and touch data to the host machine. The goal of the device was to give users of Virtual and Augmented Reality data visualisations fine grained control over selection and manipulation of the data they are viewing in the simulation.

I worked with a team who were developing the VR visualisations. They asked me if it was possible to have multiple touch pads working at the same time. We initially tried off the shelf components but it became clear that we weren’t going to find trackpads in the right shape and size. We decided to fabricate our own to exact size we wanted. We were also able to make them exactly square so that would fit into the cube. This was the first Printed Circuit Board I had developed and was a great learning project to get into PCB design.

Once we had track pads that were working correctly I started to put together the cube itself. It is made up of laser cut acrylic panels which the touch pads are stuck to the inside of. The rest of the electronics were stuck to the bottom face, with the IMU raised so that it would be in the centre of the cube.

We also didn’t want to have any ports or holes in the cube surface so I included a wireless charging system in the cube as well. The cube has a small cradle it sits in when not in use that charges the batteries through wireless power transfer.

After the hardware was tested and working I also worked on firmware for the microcontroller and a library for the Unity Game Engine so that the cube could be easily integrated into the 3D visualisations the team was working on. For more information about how the cube was used in the VR environments have a look at the publication from the project.

Publications

Cordeil, Maxime ; Bach, Benjamin ; Li, Yongchao ; Wilson, Elliott ; Dwyer, Tim. / A design space for spatio-data coordination : Tangible interaction devices for immersive information visualisation. 2017 IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium (PacificVis): Seoul, Korea - 18-21 April 2017, Proceedings. editor / Daniel Weiskopf ; Yingcai Wu ; Tim Dwyer. Piscataway NJ USA : IEEE Computer Society, 2017. pp. 46-50