βTap Tap on the back of your smartphone!

βTap demo from Luis A. Leiva on Vimeo.

βTap is an Android service that allows you to detect tap input on the back of your smartphone or tablet. You simply instantiate the service in your app and automatically get access to back-tap events. How awesome does it sound?

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  • Built-in hardware

    βTap is grounded on solid machine learning principles that enable back-tap interactions using current hardware and sensors. This means you don't need anything special to start using the Android service.

  • High accuracy

    Our studies reveal that you will get 90% of accuracy at a minimum; that is, only one out of ten back-taps would be misrecognized as such. Bear in mind that reliable back-tap detection is hard science.

  • Energy savings

    βTap uses very specific sensor signals and features, removing thus unnecessary computations and preserving battery life, even after extended periods of use.

  • Well tested

    We conduct several experiments on a weekly basis to ensure that βTap keeps improving. The service is pretty stable right now, but we will push updates from time to time so that you can get the latest version at any time.

How does it work?

When you tap on the back of your device, βTap analyzes in realtime different sensor signals (such as acceleration, gravity, or angular velocity) and computes a series of features that are fed into a classifier. Finally, the classifier estimates if a tap has actually happened or not.

You can read our publications for more info.

Demos

In order to illustrate what can be done with βTap, we have incorporated the service to the following open source apps.

Proof-of-concept app

Proof of concept

Visualize βTap interactions.

Download APK

FlutterCow app

βFlutter Cow

Fly the cow around obstacles.

Download APK

Camera app

βCamera Featured

Taking selfies finally made easy.

Download APK

Tutorial

Follow this 4-step tutorial to integrate βTap in your Android app.

Publications

Citation

If you use βTap in your academic work, please cite us:

  • E. Granell, L. A. Leiva (2016). Less Is More: Efficient Back-of-Device Tap Input Detection Using Built-in Smartphone Sensors. In Proc. ISS '16. ACM Press. DOI

LaTeX users can use the following BibTeX entry for citation:

@InProceedings{btap,
  author    = {Emilio Granell and Luis A. Leiva},
  title     = {Less Is More: Efficient Back-of-Device Tap Input Detection Using Built-in Smartphone Sensors},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS)},
  year      = {2016},
}