AcousTickBoard

Designing Interactive Passive-Acoustic

Cardboard Elements

Annalice Ni, Eddy Zhou

2021.05.21 Undergrad Symposium
Cardboard is a Ubiquitous Material
400 billion ft2 used in 2020
 Vidgets - Xiao et al.

Related Work
 Acoustruments - Laput et al.

Related Work
 Printed Paper Markers - Zheng et al.
Related Work
How can we design a low-cost interactive
cardboard element that is

recognizable
expressive
makeable
and usable?
How can we design a low-cost interactive
cardboard element that is

Recognizable?
AcousTickBoard Widget
AcousTickBoard Widget

Side view of clicking Top view of pressing

No tick Tick No tick
Sliding window
Sliding window
Sliding window
Sliding window
Feature extraction per frame
● Max amplitude
● Mean positive amplitude
● Standard deviation of amplitude
● Frequency (FFT)

Random forest
● Use a random forest classifier to predict “ticks”
● Tree of yes/no questions
● Evaluates each frame of audio data
Distance experiment
● Detectable up to 5 meters away
● Practical for smart home use
● Smart speaker and laptop
follow inverse law of sound
● Smartphone detectability
decreases linearly
How can we design a low-cost interactive
cardboard element that is

Expressive?
Predicting buttons
● Used ML model to classify all 12
buttons together
● 93.77% accuracy
How can we design a low-cost interactive
cardboard element that is

Makable?
Predicting buttons
● Used ML model to classify all 12
buttons together
● 93.77% accuracy
Button creation
Materials Creations
● 4 buttons
● Cardboard sheets ● No modifications, 1 large hole, 2 small
holes, 3 small holes
● Scissors
● Tape

Optional

● Staples
● Card (id, credit card) for measuring
● X-acto knife, ruler
Makeability results

15 minutes per button

Usable
Future work
Thank you