Capacitivo was announced jointly by Microsoft Research with several universities during the ACM Symposium on User Interface and Technology, which was held online from October 20 (local time). It is a touch-based object recognition technology that determines what an object is. It is assumed to use soft cloth products such as smart textiles.
An electrode to read the capacitance is placed on the fabric, and the object shape is measured by the change in capacitance when an object is placed there. It is said that the measurement was performed using machine learning, and in the prototype consisting of a 12 × 12 grid, it was possible to achieve 94.5% accuracy by testing 20 objects with 10 subjects.
However, there are some limitations currently. First of all, the object must be a non-metal. Also, square corners don’t work well. Not only that, but it can be changed into various forms based on fabric, but machine learning results change as the shape changes.
This technology will not be practical soon, but in the future, it will be able to respond to touch and gesture detection using fingers. When it comes to touch gestures with cloth, you might think of Google Jacquard, but in the future, the smartization of the fabric around you may accelerate. Related information can be found here .