While tangible user interface has shown its power in naturally interacting with rigid or soft objects, users cannot conveniently use different types of granular materials as the interaction media. We introduce DipMe as a smart device to recognize the types of granular media in real time, which can be used to connect the granular materials in the physical world with various virtual content. Other than vision-based solutions, we propose a dip operation of our device and exploit the haptic signals to recognize different types of granular materials. With modern machine learning tools, we find the haptic signals from different granular media are distinguishable by DipMe. With the online granular object recognition, we build several tangible interactive applications, demonstrating the effects of DipMe in perceiving granular materials and its potential in developing a tangible user interface with granular objects as the new media.

翻译：尽管实体用户界面在与刚性或软性物体自然交互方面已展现出其优势，但用户尚无法便捷地使用不同类型的颗粒材料作为交互介质。本文提出DipMe作为一种智能设备，可实时识别颗粒介质类型，从而将物理世界中的颗粒材料与各类虚拟内容相连接。区别于基于视觉的解决方案，我们设计了设备的浸入式操作方案，并利用触觉信号来识别不同类型的颗粒材料。借助现代机器学习工具，我们发现DipMe能够有效区分来自不同颗粒介质的触觉信号。通过在线颗粒物体识别系统，我们构建了多个实体交互应用案例，展示了DipMe在感知颗粒材料方面的效能，及其在以颗粒物体作为新型介质的实体用户界面开发中的潜力。