We explore how a display surface can physically emerge on demand to support both mid-air visualization and direct touch interaction. We introduce blooming, a concept that repurposes Persistence-of-Vision (POV) motion to deploy a large, touchable surface from a compact, relocatable device. Using a soft, rotating line with arch-shaped electrodes, our system renders dynamic mid-air visuals while enabling direct touch input on the manifested surface. Realizing this concept requires addressing the unique challenges of touching spinning elements, including ensuring safety, minimizing disturbances to rotation caused by touch, and detecting brief unstable touches during spinning. We present a safety-oriented device design, special blades effective in minimizing finger disturbance, and optimization techniques tailored to transient, noisy touches. We also reveal how rotation speed and electrode height significantly affect sensing accuracy and user experience. Finally, we demonstrate applications that show how blooming touch displays can flexibly augment everyday objects and environments.

We propose GadJets, an approach to remotely actuating passive materials and mechanisms using air jets for interactive and shape-changing tangible user interfaces (TUIs). Compared to previous HCI research in remote actuation, air jets offer relatively strong, distant, and safe actuation with simple control. Leveraging these advantages, we can selectively actuate multiple passive materials and mechanisms (or GadJet modules) using only one actuator. We defined a design space to outline the basic architecture and generalizable primitives for air-jet-based TUIs. Also, we exemplified our approach with diverse GadJets modules and proof-of-concept implementation of a computer-controlled air jet system. Finally, we developed a visualization system of the estimated air range based on pre-collected data to support user control. With the vision of deploying multiple passive GadJet modules in an environment fused with the actuated air jets, we demonstrated applications of interactive tabletop objects, an actuated workbench, and an actuated shelf.

The vision of programmable matter — materials that can change shape or properties in a programmable way — has inspired decades of research across robotics, materials science, and HCI. However, many line-based actuated systems struggle to achieve fine-grained geometries, due to motor size, cost, and control complexity. In this work, we introduce PopTuber, a novel approach to dynamically generate high-resolution 3D curves using passive, low-cost, multistable pop tubes. Instead of chaining actuators, our system leverages the densely arranged bellows with discrete mechanical states, collapsed, expanded, or folded, to represent and construct arbitrary curves. We present the Shaper, a device that uses only five servo motors to reconfigure tubes of any length and curved segments. Alongside the hardware, we provide design guidelines that allow our shaping principle to scale for different tube sizes, a software pipeline that can simulate the tube geometry and execute motor cmmands, and an evaluation of shaping performance and scalability. Our work challenges conventional actuator-intensive and material-oriented approaches in programmable matter, showing how passive, discretely shapable materials combined with minimal actuation can enable versatile, low-cost shape transformations along with a variety of applications.

We propose augmenting initially passive structures built from simple repeated cells, with novel active units to enable dynamic, shape-changing, and robotic applications. Inspired by metamaterials that can employ mechanisms, we build a framework that allows users to configure cells of this passive structure to allow it to perform complex tasks. A key benefit is that our structures can be repeatedly (re)configured by users inserting our configuration units to turn the passive material into, e.g., locomotion robots, integrated motion platforms, or interactive interfaces, as we demonstrate in this paper.

Flywheels are unique, versatile actuators that store and convert kinetic energy to torque, widely utilized in aerospace, robotics, haptics, and more. However, prototyping interaction using flywheels is not trivial due to safety concerns, unintuitive operation, and implementation challenges. We present TorqueCapsules: self-contained, fully-encapsulated flywheel actuation modules that make the flywheel actuators easy to control, safe to interact with, and quick to reconfigure and customize. By fully encapsulating the actuators with a wireless microcontroller, a battery, and other components, the module can be readily attached, embedded, or stuck to everyday objects, worn to people’s bodies, or combined with other devices. With our custom GUI, both novices and expert users can easily control multiple modules to design and prototype movements and kinesthetic haptics unique to flywheel actuation. We demonstrate various applications, including actuated everyday objects, wearable haptics, and expressive robots. We conducted workshops for novices and experts to employ TorqueCapsules to collect qualitative feedback and further application examples.

Public sector agencies aim to innovate not just for efficiency but also to enhance equity. Despite the growing adoption of data-driven decision-making systems in the public sector, efforts to integrate equity as a primary goal often fall short. This typically arises from inadequate early-stage involvement of underserved stakeholders and prevalent misunderstandings concerning the authentic meaning of equity from these stakeholders' perspectives. Our research seeks to address this gap by actively involving undersevered stakeholders in the process of envisioning the integration of equity within public sector data-driven decisions, particularly in the context of a building department in a Northeastern mid-sized U.S. city. Applying a speed dating method with storyboards, we explore diverse equity-centric futures within the realm of local business development, a domain where small businesses, particularly women-and minority-owned businesses, historically confront inequitable distribution of public services. We explored three essential aspects of equity: monitoring equity, resource allocation prioritization, as well as information and equity. Our findings illuminate the complexities of integrating equity into data-driven decisions, offering nuanced insights about the needs of stakeholders. We found that attempts to monitor and incorporate equity goals into public sector decision-making can unexpectedly backfire, inadvertently sparking community apprehension and potentially exacerbating existing inequities. Small business owners, including those identifying as women-and minority-owned, advocated against the use of demographic-based data in equity-focused data-driven decision-making in the public sector, instead emphasizing factors such as community needs, application complexity, and uncertainties inherent in small businesses. Drawing from these insights, we propose design implications to assist designers of public sector data-driven decision-making systems to better accommodate equity considerations.

We introduce ThrowIO, a novel style of actuated tangible user interface that facilitates throwing and catching spatial interaction powered by mobile wheeled robots on overhanging surfaces. In our approach, users throw and stick objects that are embedded with magnets to an overhanging ferromagnetic surface where wheeled robots can move and drop them at desired locations, allowing users to catch them. The thrown objects are tracked with an RGBD camera system to perform closed-loop robotic manipulations. By computationally facilitating throwing and catching interaction, our approach can be applied in many applications including kinesthetic learning, gaming, immersive haptic experience, ceiling storage, and communication. We demonstrate the applications with a proof-of-concept system enabled by wheeled robots, ceiling hardware design, and software control. Overall, ThrowIO opens up novel spatial, dynamic, and tangible interaction for users via overhanging robots, which has great potential to be integrated into our everyday space.

We present a novel design for materials that are reconfigurable by end-users. Conceptually, we propose decomposing such reconfigurable materials into (1) a generic, complex material consisting of engineered microstructures (known as metamaterials) designed to be purchased and (2) a simple configuration geometry that can be fabricated by end-users to fit their individual use cases. Specifically, in this paper we investigate reconfiguring our material’s elasticity, such that it can cover existing objects and thereby augment their material properties. Users can configure their materials by generating the configuration geometry using our interactive editor, 3D printing it using commonly available filaments (e. g., PLA), and pressing it onto the generic material for local coupling. We characterize the mechanical properties of our reconfigurable elastic metamaterial and showcase the material’s applicability as, e.g., augmentation for haptic props in virtual reality, a reconfigurable shoe sole for different activities, or a battleship-like ball game.