Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago

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Hands are the chief appendage with which we manipulate the world
around us, creating sounds as they go. As such, they are a rich
source of information that computers can leverage for input and
context sensing. Indeed, many prior works in HCI have explored
this idea by instrumenting users’ hands with a microphone, often
integrated into a ring, wristband, or watch. In this work, we explore
an alternative bare-hands approach — by using a microphone array
integrated into a user’s headset/glasses, we can use beamforming
to create a virtual microphone that tracks with the user’s fingers in
3D space. We show this method can capture even the subtle noise of
a finger translating across surfaces, including skin-to-skin contact
for micro-gestures, as well as passive widget interactions.

Project page: daehwakim.com/soundbubble
Paper: daehwakim.com/paper/SoundBubble_paper.pdf
Code: github.com/FIGLAB/SoundBubble