We present FoodSkin, a technique for adding interactive elements to foods by implementing edible circuits on the surface of the food. The circuit is easily fabricated using commercially available materials. Existing approaches to enhance the eating experience, such as presenting an electrical taste by making food part of an electronic circuit, are challenging to apply to foods with low water content due to their low conductivity. Our technique enables the integration of dry foods into an electronic circuit and provides displaying (e.g., smell or taste) and sensing (e.g., eating activity) functionalities. We describe our fabrication technique with a library of food materials that we can utilize, evaluate the conductivity and adhesion of the gold-leaf traces, introduce demonstrative applications, and conclude with a workshop we conducted to evaluate the accessibility of our technique. FoodSkin enriches the design space for the computer-augmented eating experience by enabling the digital fabrication of electronics on versatile materials, surfaces, and shapes of foods.

Virtual meeting tools, such as Zoom, can sometimes lead to inadvertently sharing private information through screen sharing features. We conducted fundamental investigations on what concerns and strategies users have for protecting their privacy. The results indicate that while most users take actions to protect their privacy before or during meetings, a significant number of users also reported experiences with inadvertent information sharing. We also found that users avoid sharing not only personal data, such as usernames, but also information that could reveal their interests and activities, such as browsing histories or personalized recommendations. Thus, we propose a system that automatically occludes areas that users do not want to share to facilitate the management of privacy during screen sharing. We conducted a data collection experiment to construct a deep learning model to detect the areas that users do not want to share with others. We implemented our system by using this model to protect information in real time during screen sharing in virtual meeting tools.

In this pictorial, we propose an approach to integrate electronics into a paper-woven craft. A paper-woven structure is formed by alternately and orthogonally weaving paper strips. The key idea is to add conductive layers to these strips by printing or transferring conductive materials. Our approach enables us to form the skeleton of an object and its wiring and sensor arrangement simultaneously. We explore the creative space of this approach, i.e., integrating functions such as sensing, display, and sound amplification into objects, for leveraging the paper-woven structure. We also outline the workflow of the approach, introduce a design support tool, and discuss example applications that combine the electronic-enabled functionality and woven structure.

Abstract Knitting and weaving patterns can be visually represented as pixel art. With hand knitting and weaving, human error (shifting, duplicating, or skipping pixels) can occur during manual fabrication. It is too costly to change already‐fabricated pixels, so experts often adapt pixels that have not yet been fabricated to make the errors less visible. This paper proposes an automatic adaptation process to minimize visual artifacts. The system presents multiple adaptation possibilities to the user, who can choose the proposed adaptation or untie and re‐fabricate their work. In typical handicraft fabrication, the design is complete before the start of fabrication and remains fixed during fabrication. Our system keeps updating the design during fabrication to tolerate human errors in the process. We implemented the proposed algorithm in a system that visualizes the knitting pattern, cross‐stitching and bead weaving processes.

Iris folding is an art-form consisting of layered strips of paper, forming a spiral pattern behind an aperture, which can be used to make cards and gift tags. This paper describes an interactive computational tool to assist in the design and construction of original iris folding patterns. The design of iris folding patterns is formulated as the calculation of a circumscribed polygonal sequence around a seed polygon. While it is possible to compute the positions of vertices analytically for a regular polygon, it is not straightforward to do so for irregular polygons. We give a numerical method for irregular polygons, which can be applied to arbitrary convex seed polygons. The user can quickly experiment with various patterns using the system prior to constructing the art-form.

This paper proposes a plug-in type RF tag localization system, using an Angle of Arrival principle, in UHF RFID, particularly targeting handheld reader/writers. Being a plug-in type, the RF tag localization system is receive-only, incurring no radio license requirement, small in size and can be built at low cost. Our fundamental idea is to employ a newly developed short-range mono-pulse method for the RF tag direction detection enabled with affordable software defined radio device and an analog front end. In this paper, we report an experimental evaluation with a functional prototype primarily on the detecting accuracy. It is shown that we can achieve about 3 degree accuracy for RF tags at 7.3 m distance from a 4 W EIRP reader/writer. Because the measurement in the direction of boresight is more stable than the other directions, the direction accuracy can be improved when we feed back the direction detection to the orientation of handheld reader/writer. We also confirm this feature experimentally.

We introduce the interactive system "Beady" to assist the design and construction of customized 3D beadwork. The user first creates a polygonal mesh model called the design model that represents the overall structure of the beadwork. Each edge of the mesh model corresponds to a bead in the beadwork. We provide two methods to create the design model. One is interactive modeling from scratch. The user defines the mesh topology with gestural interaction and the system continuously adjusts edge lengths by considering the physical constraints among neighboring beads. The other is automatic conversion that takes an existing polygonal model as input and generates a near-hexagonal mesh model with a near-uniform edge length as output. The system then converts the design model into a beadwork model with the appropriate wiring. Computation of an appropriate wiring path requires careful consideration, and we present an algorithm based on face stripification of the mesh. The system also provides a visual step-by-step guide to assist the manual beadwork construction process. We show several beadwork designs constructed by the authors and by test users using the system.

Beadwork is the art of connecting beads together by wires. While common beadwork is two-dimensional (2D), three-dimensional (3D) beadwork is also popular in oriental regions such as Japan and China. However, the design and construction of 3D beadwork is very difficult. The final shape is defined by the complicated three-dimensional interaction between beads and wires, thus making it very difficult to design manually. One also needs to specify an appropriate wire path to hold the beads together and to manually insert the wire into the beads one by one following the path to construct the beadwork. Careful observation of existing beadwork structures shows several geometrically interesting problems, which make beadwork design an interesting technical challenge.

Abstract We developed an interactive system to design a customized cover for a given three‐dimensional (3D) object such as a camera, teapot, or car. The system first computes the convex hull of the input geometry. The user segments it into several cloth patches by drawing on the 3D surface. This paper provides two technical contributions. First, it introduces a specialized flattening algorithm for cover patches. It makes each two‐dimensional edge in the flattened pattern equal to or longer than the original 3D edge; a smaller patch would fail to cover the object, and a larger patch would result in extra wrinkles. Second, it introduces a mechanism to verify that the user‐specified opening would be large enough for the object to be removed. Starting with the initial configuration, the system virtually “pulls” the object out of the cover while avoiding excessive stretching of cloth patches. We used the system to design real covers and confirmed that it functions as intended.

Abstract A knitted animal is made of a closed surface consisting of several knitted patches knitted out of yarn and stuffed with cotton ( Fig. 1 ). We introduce a system to create a knitting pattern from a given 3D surface model (mainly designed for rotund animal models). A knitting pattern is an instructional diagram describing how to knit yarn to obtain a desired shape. Since the creation of knitting patterns requires special skill, this is difficult for nonprofessionals. Our system automates the process and allows anyone to obtain his or her original knitting patterns from a 3D model. The system first covers the surface of the model with parallel winding strips of constant width. The system then samples the strip at constant intervals to convert it into a knitting pattern. The result is presented in a standard visual format so that the user can easily refer it during actual knitting. We show several examples of knitted animals created using the system. Example of a knitted animal. A typical knitted animal consists of several circular and cylindrical patches. image