CapAura: A Proxemic Interactive Infrastructure on Everyday Furniture through Capacitive Architecture Unit
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: We propose CapAura, a proxemic infrastructure that enables users to interact with the living space. We achieve this by deploying a ceiling-to-floor capacitive space and utilizing conductive furniture in between as passive electric-field extenders, transforming surface-limited floor sensing into volumetric, whole-body awareness with zero instrumentation on the user and no modification to the furniture itself. We develop CapAura into a prototype that enables room-scale proxemic sensing across multiple scales, detecting people’s Position, Identity, Movement, and Orientation—without cameras or worn devices. From a sparse 3×5 capacitive grid, our prototype achieves 29.7 cm MPJPE (Mean Per Joint Position Error) across 32 body joints, 99.6% within-session user-identity recognition, 66.1% activity recognition, and 73.6% hand-orientation recognition. Beyond passive sensing, our user study (N=16) shows that furniture proximity and touch can serve as ambient interaction triggers—perceived as functionally effective (M=4.44, p=.002) and novel and exciting (M=4.79, p<.001)—turning the living space into a spatial interface that reaches beyond the user to their immediate, touchable surroundings.
Institutions: Keio University, Musashino Art University
Language: English
Subfield: Human-Computer Interaction
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7225007677