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Urushi (Japanese lacquer) is a natural resin paint with electrical insulating capability. By using it as a base material and coating material for electronic circuits, it is possible to construct a circuit with an elegant appearance and feel. It is also possible to build a multilayered electronic circuit by using urushi as insulation layers. In this study, we investigate techniques to construct touch interfaces using a multilayered electronic circuit (urushi circuit). At first, we fabricated an urushi circuit with a touch electrode consisting of two layers. To improve its appearance, we fabricated urushi circuits in which all touch electrodes are arranged on the top layer and all wires are hidden in the bottom layer. Moreover, as an extension of the touch interface, we built a grid of touch electrodes that realizes two-dimensional touch sensing.

We present ThumbSlide, which is an interaction technique for a smartwatch that prevents occlusion caused by the user's finger; the technique realizes continuous manipulation by estimating the moving amount of the thumb. Combining with any determining operation (e.g., clench of the hand), our technique enables the user to select a target by only the hand that is wearing a smartwatch. Our system estimates the moving amount of the thumb by muscles' expansion caused by its movement. The muscle expansion is measured by a specially designed wrist-worn sensor device. Moreover, the device can recognize the clench of the hand as an instantaneous change of the wrist's contour. In this paper, we show the implementation of ThumbSlide and its example applications.