MobiRing: A Finger-Worn Wireless Motion Tracker

MobiRing is a compact, finger-worn wireless motion-tracking platform that can be reprogrammed for a wide variety of features to augmented mobile computing. First, it works as a wireless mouse in the air without requiring a surface for a mouse or a track pad, making it suitable for augmented-reality or virtual-reality systems. Second, it supports collection of stroke-in-the-air data that can be interpreted as gestures for commands, text input, or raw strokes. An advanced version can combine input from additional units on multiple fingers for richer possibilities. Third, the ability to quickly switch pairing among multiple host computing systems enables MobiRing to support drag-and-drop-like operations across systems such as PCs, smart phones, tablets, display walls, and even display less embedded systems, where a wired connection may be inconvenient if not infeasible. MobiRing has been prototyped with an ultra-compact wireless sensing platform with an on-board triaxial accelerometer and a short range wireless transceiver with an optional second accelerometer for enhanced accuracy. The prototype has been evaluated quantitatively for accuracy and qualitatively for usability by asking ten volunteer novice users to try a variety of the proposed operations. The results show that the Mobi Ring system to be intuitive for mouse-like functions and the recognition accuracy of each gesture is over 90%.