leithinger

ATLAS Members Explore Childhood Play and Learning Through Interactive Design at IDC 2023

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 18:29:52 +0000

ATLAS Members Explore Childhood Play and Learning Through Interactive Design at IDC 2023 Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 06/19/2023 - 12:29

11 ATLAS community members have contributed to work featured at the 22nd annual ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference to be held on June 19-23, 2023 at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. IDC is the premier international conference for researchers, educators and practitioners to share the latest research findings, innovative methodologies and new technologies in the areas of inclusive child-centered design, learning and interaction. IDC’23 is hosted by the Center for Computer Science and Learning Sciences at Northwestern University.

Coming out of the pandemic, this year’s theme asks participants to “rediscover childhood” to understand what it means to be a child in this and coming decades and what adults can do to provide a sustainable and equitable future for the next generation. Key topics include privacy, ethics, equity, social and emotional wellbeing, sustainability, and healthy human development.

Research presented by ATLAS faculty, students and affiliates

Designing Together, Miles Apart: A Longitudinal Tabletop Telepresence Adventure in Online Co-Design with Children
Casey Lee Hunt (ATLAS THING Lab member, PhD student), Kaiwen Sun, Zahra Dhuliawala, Fumi Tsukiyama, Iva Matkovic, Zachary Schwemler (ATLAS MS alumnus), Anastasia Wolf, Zihao Zhang, Allison Druin, Amanda Huynh, Daniel Leithinger (ATLAS THING Lab Director, Computer Science faculty member), Jason Yip

Children’s online co-design has become prevalent since COVID-19. However, related research focuses on insights gained across several shorter-term projects, rather than longitudinal investigations. To explore longitudinal co-design online, we engaged in participatory design with children (ages 8 - 12) for 20 sessions in two years on a single project: an online collaboration platform with tabletop telepresence robots. We found that (1) the online technology space required children to play a role as technology managers and troubleshooters, (2) the home setting shaped online social dynamics, and (3) providing children the ability to choose their design techniques prevented gridlock from situational uncertainties. We discuss how each finding resulted from interplay between our long-term technology design and online co-design processes. We then present insights about the future of online co-design, a conceptual model for longitudinal co-design online, and describe opportunities for further longitudinal online co-design research to generate new methods, techniques, and theories.

Exploring Computational Thinking with Physical Play through Design
Junnan Yu, Ronni Hayden (PhD student), Ricarose Roque (Assistant Professor, Information Science)

Physical play has often been leveraged to provide children with active and engaging learning experiences. However, coding activities are predominantly sedentary in front of the screen, and the application of physical play in Computer Science education is less explored, e.g., how can we engage in computational thinking (CT) through physical play? In this design-based exploration, we conducted three design activities where young children, college students, and researchers were invited to create physical play projects using the BBC micro:bit and reflect on their experiences. By examining participants’ projects and creating processes, we provide empirical evidence that remixing physical play activities with coding can engage learners in various CT concepts and practices, reveal how CT concepts and practices can be represented in physical play, and highlight implications for designing physical play-mediated computational learning experiences. Ultimately, we encourage more learning experiences to incorporate physical play into computing education for children.

Ricarose Roque chairs the session “Computational and Data Literacy” in which this paper is included.

[Pictorial] Imagining Alternative Visions of Computing: Photo-Visuals of Material, Social, and Emotional Contexts from Family Creative Learning
Ricarose Roque (Assistant Professor, Information Science)

This pictorial presents visuals of families engaging with creative technologies as “knowledge-building artifacts” to provoke reflection on the social, material, and emotional context of designed interactions (“things that make you think”) as well as provocations to re-value these contexts and promote alternative visions in what and how engagement with computing can look like (“things that matter”). The selected images are from a large and ongoing collection of documentation from a family technology program. The images were captured using the Reggio Emilia documentation approach to documentation, which aims to “make learning visible.”

Ricarose Roque is one of three Pictorial Chairs in the conference Organizing Committee.

[Work-in-progress] Cartoonimator: A Low-cost, Paper-based Animation Kit for Computational Thinking
Krithik Ranjan (ATLAS ACME Lab member, PhD student), Peter Gyory (ATLAS ACME Lab member, PhD Candidate), Michael L. Rivera (Utility Research Lab Director, Assistant Professor, Human-Computer Interaction and Digital Fabrication), and Ellen Yi-Luen Do (ATLAS ACME Lab Director, Computer Science faculty member)

Computational thinking has been identified as an important skill for children to learn in the 21st century, and many innovative kits and tools have been developed to integrate it into children’s learning. Yet, most solutions require the use of devices like computers or other expensive hardware, thus being inaccessible to low-income schools and communities. We present Cartoonimator, a low-cost, paper-based computational kit for children to create animations and engage with computational thinking. Cartoonimator requires only paper and a smartphone to use, offering an affordable learning experience. Children can draw the scenes and characters for their animation on the paper, which is printed with computer vision markers. We developed the mobile web app to provide an interface to capture keyframes and compile them into animations. In this paper, we describe the implementation and workflow of Cartoonimator, its deployment with children at a local STEAM event, and a planned evaluation for the kit.

[Work-in-progress] Empower Children in Nigeria to Design the Future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) through Writing
Cornelius Onimisi Adejoro, Luise Arn, Larissa Schwartz (Master's student), Tom Yeh (Associate Professor, Computer Science)

This paper presents a new approach to engaging children in Nigeria to share their views of AI. This approach is centered on an inclusive writing contest for children in a secondary school in Abuja to write about AI to compete for prizes and share their writings with others. A preliminary analysis of the first 11 articles we received exhibits diverse gender and ethnic representation that conveys cultural values and perspectives distinct from those of the children in Western countries. This finding suggests future work to conduct an in-depth cross-cultural analysis of the articles and to replicate similar writing contests to engage children in other underrepresented countries

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ATLAS researchers receive seed grants from Resilient Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity Interdisciplinary Research Theme

Anonymous — Fri, 19 May 2023 15:49:58 +0000

ATLAS researchers receive seed grants from Resilient Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity Interdisciplinary Research Theme Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/19/2023 - 09:49

Two ATLAS researchers received a seed grant to study how we might design sustainable interactions between machines and non-human organisms.

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CHI 2023 features works by 19 ATLAS community members

Anonymous — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 18:22:03 +0000

CHI 2023 features works by 19 ATLAS community members Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/25/2023 - 12:22

We are happy to announce that 19 members of the ATLAS community contributed to work accepted for the 2023 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, taking place in Hamburg, Germany, April 23–28.

Accepting fewer than 25 percent of submissions, CHI is the premier international conference on human-computer interaction (HCI), attracting researchers and practitioners from around the world.

A special shout-out goes to Laura Devendorf, Etta Sandry and Emma Goodwill, who were awarded an Honorable Mention (top 5% of submissions) for their paper, "AdaCAD: Parametric Design as a New Form of Notation for Complex Weaving."

Details of all accepted work by members of the ATLAS community, which includes faculty with tenure homes in the College of Engineering and Applied Science and College of Media, Communication and Information, are listed below.

ATLAS @ CHI 2023 Papers

AdaCAD: Parametric Design as a New Form of Notation for Complex Weaving (BEST PAPER HONORABLE MENTION)

Laura Devendorf (ATLAS Unstable Design Lab Director, Information Science faculty member), Kathryn Walters , Marianne Fairbanks , Etta Sandry (ATLAS Unstable Design Lab weaving resident), Emma R. Goodwill (ATLAS Unstable Design Lab member, undergraduate student)

Woven textiles are increasingly a medium through which HCI is inventing new technologies. Key challenges in integrating woven textiles in HCI include the high level of textile knowledge required to make effective use of the new possibilities they afford and the need for tools that bridge the concerns of textile designers and concerns of HCI researchers. This paper presents AdaCAD, a parametric design tool for designing woven textile structures. Through our design and evaluation of AdaCAD we found that parametric design helps weavers notate and explain the logics behind the complex structures they generate. We discuss these finding in relation to prior work in integrating craft and/or weaving in HCI, histories of woven notation, and boundary object theory to illuminate further possibilities for collaboration between craftspeople and HCI practitioners.

Marking Material Interactions with Computer Vision

Peter Gyory (ATLAS ACME Lab member, PhD candidate), S. Sandra Bae (ATLAS ACME Lab member, PhD student), Ruhan Yang (ATLAS ACME Lab member, PhD student), Ellen Yi-Luen Do (ATLAS ACME Lab Director, Computer Science faculty member), Clement Zheng (PhD alumnus, ATLAS ACME Lab)

The electronics-centered approach to physical computing presents challenges when designers build tangible interactive systems due to its inherent emphasis on circuitry and electronic components. To explore an alternative physical computing approach we have developed a computer vision (CV) based system that uses a webcam, computer, and printed fiducial markers to create functional tangible interfaces. Through a series of design studios, we probed how designers build tangible interfaces with this CV-driven approach. In this paper, we apply the annotated portfolio method to reflect on the fifteen outcomes from these studios. We observed that CV markers offer versatile materiality for tangible interactions, afford the use of democratic materials for interface construction, and engage designers in embodied debugging with their own vision as a proxy for CV. By sharing our insights, we inform other designers and educators who seek alternative ways to facilitate physical computing and tangible interaction design.

Felt Experiences with Kombucha Scoby: Exploring First-person Perspectives with Living Matter

Netta Ofer (ATLAS Living Matter Lab member, PhD student), Mirela Alistar (ATLAS Living Matter Lab Director, Computer Science faculty member)

Designing with living organisms can offer new perspectives to design research and practices in HCI. In this work, we explore first-person perspectives through design research with Kombucha Scoby, a microbial biofilm. We began with a material design exploration, producing digitally fabricated and crafted samples with Scoby. As we noticed our felt experiences while growing and working with Kombucha Scoby, we shifted towards a reflective autoethnographic study. Through reflective writings, we followed sensory experiences such as hearing the Kombucha fermentation, touching the Scoby while harvesting it, and watching the slow growth of layers over time. Subsequently, we designed "sensory engagement probes”: designed experiments that bring forward new connections and communicate our process, motivations, and tensions that emerged while engaging with the organism. Lastly, we discuss how such design research can inform material design with living matter by creating space to contemplate "life as shared experience" and more-than-human design perspectives.

Data, Data, Everywhere: Uncovering Everyday Data Experiences for People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Keke Wu (recent ATLAS PhD student), Michelle H. Tran, Emma Petersen (ATLAS MS alumnus), Varsha Koushik, Danielle Albers Szafir (former ATLAS faculty member)

Data is everywhere, but may not be accessible to everyone. Conventional data visualization tools and guidelines often do not actively consider the specific needs and abilities of people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD), leaving them excluded from data-driven activities and vulnerable to ethical issues. To understand the needs and challenges people with IDD have with data, we conducted 15 semi-structured interviews with individuals with IDD and their caregivers. Our algorithmic interview approach situated data in the lived experiences of people with IDD to uncover otherwise hidden data encounters in their everyday life. Drawing on findings and observations, we characterize how they conceptualize data, when and where they use data, and what barriers exist when they interact with data. We use our results as a lens to reimagine the role of visualization in data accessibility and establish a critical near-term research agenda for cognitively accessible visualization.

Designing Accessible Visualizations for People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Keke Wu (recent ATLAS PhD student)

Visualization amplifies cognition and helps a viewer see the trends, patterns, and outliers in data. However, conventional visualization tools and guidelines do not actively consider the unique needs and abilities of people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD), leaving them excluded from data-driven activities and vulnerable to ethical issues in everyday life. My dissertation work explores the challenges and opportunities of cognitively accessible visualization. Through mixed-method approaches and close collaboration with people with IDD, my team and I ran experiments and developed guidelines to improve current visualizations, we interviewed people with IDD and gained an initial understanding of their daily data experiences, and we are currently in the process of revising a participatory design workshop to create accessible visualizations for and with this population. For the remaining dissertation work, I hope to further expand our knowledge of cognitively accessible visualization, translating what I have learned from these experiences into a graphical user interface that supports people with IDD with their self-advocacy and self-expression using personally relevant data. My ultimate career goal is to theorize cognitively accessible visualization and empower people with IDD to make informed decisions and generate meaningful discoveries through accessible visual analytics.

Crafting Interactive Circuits on Glazed Ceramic Ware

Clement Zheng (PhD alumnus, ATLAS ACME Lab), Bo Han, Xin Liu, Laura Devendorf (ATLAS Unstable Design Lab Director, Information Science faculty member), Hans Tan, Ching Chiuan Yen

Glazed ceramic is a versatile material that we use every day. In this paper, we present a new approach that instruments existing glazed ceramic ware with interactive electronic circuits. We informed this work by collaborating with a ceramics designer and connected his craft practice to our experience in physical computing. From this partnership, we developed a systematic approach that begins with the subtractive fabrication of traces on glazed ceramic surfaces via the resist-blasting technique, followed by applying conductive ink into the inlaid traces. We capture and detail this approach through an annotated flowchart for others to refer to, as well as externalize the material insights we uncovered through ceramic and circuit swatches. We then demonstrate a range of interactive home applications built with this approach. Finally, we reflect on the process we took and discuss the importance of collaborating with craftspeople for material-driven research within HCI.

TactorBots: A Haptic Design Toolkit for Out-of-lab Exploration of Emotional Robotic Touch

Ran Zhou (ATLAS THING Lab member, PhD student), Zachary Schwemler (ATLAS MS alumnus), Akshay Baweja, Harpreet Sareen, Casey Lee Hunt (ATLAS THING Lab member, PhD student), Daniel Leithinger (ATLAS THING Lab Director, Computer Science faculty member)

Emerging research has demonstrated the viability of emotional communication through haptic technology inspired by interpersonal touch. However, the meaning-making of artificial touch remains ambiguous and contextual. We see this ambiguity caused by robotic touch’s "otherness" as an opportunity for exploring alternatives. To empower emotional haptic design in longitudinal out-of-lab exploration, we devise TactorBots, a design toolkit consisting of eight wearable hardware modules for rendering robotic touch gestures controlled by a web-based software application. We deployed TactorBots to thirteen designers and researchers to validate its functionality, characterize its design experience, and analyze what, how, and why alternative perceptions, practices, contexts, and metaphors would emerge in the experiment. We provide suggestions for designing future toolkits and field studies based on our experiences. Reflecting on the findings, we derive design implications for further enhancing the ambiguity and shifting the mindsets to expand the design space.

Note: This team will also lead an Interactivity session: Demonstrating TactorBots: A Haptic Design Toolkit for Exploration of Emotional Robotic Touch

Workshops

ATLAS will also be represented at the Electrofab 2023 workshop during CHI. This year’s theme is “Beyond Prototyping Boards: Future Paradigms for Electronics Toolkits,” and will feature two papers authored by ATLAS members.

Fabricating Paper Circuits with Subtractive Processing

Ruhan Yang (ATLAS ACME Lab member, PhD student), Krithik Ranjan (ATLAS ACME Lab member, PhD student), Ellen Yi-Luen Do (ATLAS ACME Lab Director, Computer Science faculty member)

This paper introduces a new method of paper circuit fabrication that overcomes design barriers and increases flexibility in circuit design. Conventional circuit boards rely on thin traces, which limits the complexity and accuracy when applied to paper circuits. To address this issue, we propose a method that uses large conductive zones in paper circuits and performs subtractive processing during their fabrication. This approach eliminates design barriers and allows for more flexibility in circuit design. We introduce PaperCAD, a software tool that simplifies the design process by converting traditional circuit design to paper circuit design. We demonstrate our technique by creating two paper circuit boards. Our approach has the potential to promote the development of new applications for paper circuits.

Facilitating Physical Computing with Computer Vision Markers

Clement Zheng (PhD alumnus, ATLAS ACME Lab member), Peter Gyory (ATLAS ACME Lab member, PhD Candidate), Ellen Yi-Luen Do (ATLAS ACME Lab Director and Computer Science faculty member)

The electronics-centered approach to physical computing presents challenges when designers build tangible interactive systems due to its inherent emphasis on circuitry and electronic components. To explore an alternative physical computing approach we have developed a computer vision (CV) based system that uses a webcam, computer, and printed fiducial markers to create functional tangible interfaces. Over the last three years, we ran a series of studios with design participants to investigate how CV markers can participate in physical computing and the construction of physical interactive systems. We observed that CV markers offer versatile materiality for tangible interactions, afford the use of democratic materials for interface construction, and engage designers in embodied debugging with their own vision as a proxy for CV. Taking these insights, we are developing a visual editor that enables designers to easily program marker behavior and connect it to keyboard events. We believe that such a platform will enable designers to develop physical and digital interfaces concurrently while minimizing the complexity of integrating both sides. In addition, this platform can also facilitate the construction of many alternative interfaces for existing software that cater to different people. We discuss our motivation, progress, and future work of this research here.

Two ATLAS community members also co-organized a workshop in the Extended Abstracts portion of CHI 2023.

Living Bits and Radical Aminos: A Workshop on Bio-Digital Interfaces for Human-Computer Interaction

Jack Forman, Pat Pataranutaporn, Phillip Gough, Raphael Kim, Fiona Bell (PhD Candidate), Netta Ofer (ATLAS Living Matter Lab member, PhD student), Jasmine Lu, Angela Vujic, Muqing Bai, Pattie Maes, Hiroshi Ishii, Misha Sra

As knowledge around bio-digital interaction continues to unfold, there are new opportunities for HCI researchers to integrate biology as a design and computational material. Our motivation for the workshop is to bring together interdisciplinary researchers with interest in exploring the next generation of biological HCI and exploring novel bio-digital interfaces implicating diverse contexts, scales, and stakeholders. The workshop aims to provide a space for interactive discussions, presentations, and brainstorming regarding opportunities and approaches for HCI around bio-digital interfaces. We invite researchers from both academia and industry to submit a short position paper in the following areas: Synthetic Biology, Biological Circuits, Do-It-Yourself Biology (DIYBio), Biomimetic Interfaces, Living Interfaces, Living Artefacts, and Bio-ethics. We will evaluate submissions on fit, ability to stimulate discussion, and contribution to HCI. On our website we have included examples of past work in this area to help inspire and inform position papers. Our website will host a recording of the entire workshop session with accepted papers to support asynchronous viewing for participants who are unable to attend in-person or synchronously.

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ATLAS research front and center at DIS’22

Anonymous — Wed, 29 Jun 2022 19:26:58 +0000

ATLAS research front and center at DIS’22 Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/29/2022 - 13:26

Researchers from ATLAS Institute's Unstable Design, THING, Living Matter and Superhuman Computing labs presented four papers, including three that received “Honorable Mention” awards, at the ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '22).

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DIS'22: Exploring how designers approach emotional robotic touch

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 10:54:16 +0000

DIS'22: Exploring how designers approach emotional robotic touch Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/22/2022 - 04:54

THING Lab

“EmotiTactor: Exploring How Designers Approach Emotional Robotic Touch,” authored by Ran Zhou, Harpreet Sareen, Yufei Zhang and Assistant Professor Daniel Leithinger, director of the THING Lab, won a Best Pictorial Honorable Mention award at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '22). Zhou, an ATLAS PhD student who was also the publication co-chair for DIS'22, presented the research during the Multisensory Design session.

Prior psychology findings show humans can communicate distinct emotions solely through touch, and in this work, THING Lab researchers hypothesize that similar effects might also be applicable to robotic touch. Their findings uncover that the "otherness" of robotic touch broadens the design possibilities of emotional communication beyond mimicking interpersonal touch. Bringing designers into the exploration of emotional robotic touch, the researchers discuss their design decisions and reflect on their insights. To enable designers to easily generate and modify various types of affective touch for conveying emotions (e.g., anger, happiness, etc.), the researchers also developed a platform consisting of a robotic tactor interface and a software design tool. When conducting an elicitation study with 11 interaction designers, they discovered common patterns in their generated tactile sensations for each emotion.The researchers also illustrated the strategies, metaphors, and reactions that the designers deployed in the design process.

Publication

Ran Zhou, Harpreet Sareen, Yufei Zhang, and Daniel Leithinger. 2022. EmotiTactor: Exploring How Designers Approach Emotional Robotic Touch. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1330–1344. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533487 .pdf (June 13-17, 2022—Virtual Event, Australia) [Best Pictorial Honorable Mention].

Prior psychology findings show humans can communicate distinct emotions solely through touch. In this award-winning work presented at DIS'22, THING Lab researchers hypothesize that similar effects might also be apply to robotic touch.

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Augmenting Books With Tangible Animation

Anonymous — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 19:01:10 +0000

Augmenting Books With Tangible Animation Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 01/31/2022 - 12:01

SIGGRAPH sat down with Purnendu, a PhD student in the ATLAS Institute and a researcher at Meta Reality Labs, to talk about his team’s SIGGRAPH 2021 Labs project, “Electriflow: Augmenting Books With Tangible Animation Using Soft Electrohydraulic Actuators.” The team's actuator technology strives to augment animation within physical books.

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POPO lets novices program from inside their VR surroundings

Anonymous — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 17:04:30 +0000

POPO lets novices program from inside their VR surroundings Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 11/09/2021 - 10:04

Creating a virtual reality environment typically requires those creating the environment to be well-versed in coding.

Julia Uhr, an ATLAS PhD student and researcher in the ACME Lab, has created a fun 3D visual programming language that empowers novice coders to create customized VR environments while inside those environments.

Called POPO (Pop On Pop Off), the coding language’s 3D block structure executes instructions from the top-down and from the center-out, allowing programmers to construct their code as complex, branching 3D structures, which helps them visualize the logical and spatial relationships between the code elements.

“POPO explores how the embodied interaction of grabbing code blocks and snapping them together like Legos can emphasize the playfulness and creativity of programming,” says Uhr, who is advised by Professor Ellen Do (ATLAS Institute, computer science), Assistant Professor Daniel Leithinger (ATLAS Institute, computer science) and Ajume Wingo, associate professor of philosophy.

Users wear VR headsets and use controllers to manipulate the objects in 3D space to build the environment they desire.

To write code in POPO, users choose spheres in the virtual environment to make variables. The spheres can be combined with other shapes, such as “If” blocks and “For” loops to create instructions. The instructions can then be executed in VR by pressing a play button. Running the code adds objects, animations or interactions to the VR scene.

“The cool thing is that you can write the exact same code in many different configurations,” Uhr says. “You can use that to make it look cool, or to organize your code in more interesting ways or to emphasize different parts of your code because looking at it from different angles shows different parts of it.”

Once these parts are put into a complex function, they form a branching shape, and the different branches can be used as other options for organizing the user’s code and building it as a visual object.

“The goal is to make programming fun and creative and to help others learn while building VR worlds,” Uhr says.

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HapticBots give form to virtual surfaces

Anonymous — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 23:49:03 +0000

HapticBots give form to virtual surfaces Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/14/2021 - 17:49

When users reach out to touch a visible surface in virtual reality, it normally isn't there. But a team of researchers in ATLAS Institute's THING Lab have been exploring ways to make the virtual tangible. Building on their past work, PhD graduate Ryo Suzuki and Assistant Professor Daniel Leithinger recently published a paper that was presented for ACM's Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology, introducing an intriguing application of small swarm robots that dynamically move to provide physical touchpoints on demand whenever the user reaches out and touches a virtual point in space.

Coined HapticBots, the Rubix cube-sized robots reach the hand just in time to provide haptic feedback. While each robot can render the surface touched by a single fingertip, having a fast-moving, shape-changing swarm of them gives the illusion of a large virtual surface. Each robot controls a small piece of the surface, the size of 2–3 fingertips, equivalent to one pin of a shape display that can be moved around, rotated, raised and lowered to encounter a fingertip, as it approaches the virtual object. The small robots can be also be picked up by the user and deployed to a different surface. Possible applications for the technology include remote collaboration, education and training, design and 3D modeling, and gaming and entertainment.

Suzuki, now an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Calgary, was the lead author for the paper, collaborating with a Microsoft Research team and his former advisor, Leithinger.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFq5JNtXSKo]

In virtual reality, when you reach out and try to touch a visible surface, it normally isn't there. Using a swarm of Rubik's Cube-sized, shape-changing robots, the illusion becomes physical.

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RoomShift research: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications magazine's cover story

Anonymous — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 13:04:53 +0000

RoomShift research: IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications magazine's cover story Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/10/2021 - 07:04

THING Lab researchers, led by recent PhD graduate, Ryo Suzuki, developed a swarm of shape-changing robots that move furniture around a room, opening up new haptic ideas for virtual reality.

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Origami comes to life with new shape-changing materials

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 21:52:25 +0000

Origami comes to life with new shape-changing materials Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/22/2021 - 15:52

Imagine opening up a book of nature photos only to see a kaleidoscope of graceful butterflies flutter out from the page. Such fanciful storybooks might soon be possible thanks to the work of a team of designers and engineers at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� ATLAS Institute.

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