Interactive Chair: A Body-Oriented Approach to Interact with 3D Virtual World

Hsin-Hsien Chiu, Seung Wook Kim

Motivation
In everyday life, we spend most of time sitting on a chair. While our both hands get busy with holding a book, writing a memo, or manipulating keyboard and mouse, the rest of our body is suspended on the seat pan or backrest of the chair. Although human body often expresses our need or intention in the form of a posture or an action, the use of chair has conventionally excluded such feedback from our daily intellectual activities. The interactive chair, as we propose herein, is expected to provide more natural way to interact with the computer by sensing or responding to our bodily actions.

Intended Use Cases
The interactive chair can be naturally applied in navigating the 3D virtual world that utilizes the spatial orientation and the perspective mechanism associated with our physical body. For example:

1. MMORPG: where both hands can be saved for various actions other than navigating.
2. Educational-purpose 3D environments: where most users are not familiar with rapid and accurate control of keyboard and mouse.

3. Occupants' control of HVAC systems: HVAC systems (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning System) could be modified by occupants’ control according to individual demand via manifold human gestures interacting with interior furniture.

Implementation
1. Potential sensing devices (input)

1. Using force sensitive resistor, potentiometer, and/or accelerometer, IR sensor, etc.
2. Mounting positions of sensors on the chair: swivel axis, seat pan, and/or footrest, etc.

2. Mapping input data to actions in the 3D world
a) Changing the direction of gaze:
Mapping the swivel angle of chair into the viewing direction in the virtual world
b) Changing the moving direction:
Interpreting the pressure distribution on the seat into the moving direction

3. Potential 3D Application (output)

1. Torque game engine-based 3D World (C++), or
2. Java3D-based simple application (alternative)

Related Works (more to come)
1. Galen Cranz. “The chair: rethinking culture, body, and design,” New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.
2. Hong Z. Tan, Lynne A. Slivovsky, and Alex Pentland, "A sensing chair using pressure distribution sensors," IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 261-268, 2001.