Hidden Interfaces for Ambient Computing: Interacting with High-brightness Visuals through Everyday Materials

ABSTRACT Consumer electronics are increasingly using traditional materials to allow technology to better blend into everyday environments. Specifically, transmissive materials enable emissive displays to disappear when turned off, and appear when turned on. However, covering displays with textile meshes, veneer, one-way mirrors, or translucent plastics greatly limit the display brightness of typical graphical displays. In this work, we leverage a parallel rendering technique to enable ultrabright graphics that can pass through transmissive materials. While previous work has shown interactive hidden displays, our approach unlocks expressive interfaces with practical end-to-end software and low-cost hardware implementation on mass-produced passive OLED displays. We developed a set of interactive prototypes with touch-sensing that can blend into traditional aesthetics due to the ability to provide user interfaces through wood, textile, plastic and mirrored surfaces.