Lamello: Passive Acoustic Sensing for Tangible Input Components
Valkyrie Savage, Andrew Head, Björn Hartmann, Dan Goldman, Gautham Mysore, Wilmot Li
CHI 2015

We describe Lamello, an approach for creating tangible input components that recognize user interaction via passive acoustic sensing. Lamello employs comb-like structures with varying-length tines at interaction points (e.g., along slider paths). Moving a component generates tine strikes; a real-time audio processing pipeline analyzes the resultant sounds and emits high-level interaction events. Our main contributions are in the co-design of the tine structures, information encoding schemes, and audio analysis. We demonstrate 3D printed Lamello-powered buttons, sliders, and dials.