AuraRing: Precise Electromagnetic Finger Tracking

Farshid Salemi Parizi, Eric Whitmire, Shwetak Patel

AuraRing is 5-DoF electromagnetic tracker that enables precise, accurate, and fine-grained finger tracking for AR, VR and wearable applications.

Abstract

Wearable computing platforms, such as smartwatches and head-mounted mixed reality displays, demand new input devices for high-fidelity interaction. We present AuraRing, a wearable magnetic tracking system designed for tracking fine-grained finger movement. The hardware consists of a ring with an embedded electromagnetic transmitter coil and a wristband with multiple sensor coils. By measuring the magnetic fields at different points around the wrist, AuraRing estimates the five degree-of-freedom pose of the ring. We develop two different approaches to pose reconstruction—a first-principles iterative approach and a closed-form neural network approach. Notably, AuraRing requires no runtime supervised training, ensuring user and session independence. AuraRing has a resolution of 0.1mm and a dynamic accuracy of 4.4mm, as measured through a user evaluation with optical ground truth. The ring is completely self-contained and consumes just 2.3mW of power.