Haptic technologies have advanced rapidly, yet exploration of robotic touch remains dominated by replicating realistic environmental cues or hand gestures, which narrows the design space and risks social resistance. This paper argues for alternatives: grounded in the notion of “otherness” from human-robot interaction (HRI), we propose treating robotic touch’s inherent otherness as a design quality. Instead of being a limitation in pursuing realism, otherness can be embraced to elicit ambiguity and provoke alternative interpretations, fostering expressive and evocative robotic touch design. To develop this perspective, we analyze inspirational art and design precedents and four design research cases through a reflective Research through Design (RtD) approach. Through this analysis, we articulate a set of design languages structured around why otherness matters for touch meaning-making, how it can be shaped through design strategies, and where it can be embedded within robotic touch systems. We conclude by reflecting on the tensions and risks involved in designing robotic touch with otherness in mind.

Driven by the vision of everyday haptics, the HCI community is advocating for "design touch first" and investigating "how to touch well." However, a gap remains between the exploratory nature of haptic design and technical reproducibility. We present Shape-Kit, a hybrid design toolkit embodying our "crafting haptics" metaphor, where hand touch is transduced into dynamic pin-based sensations that can be freely explored across the body. An ad-hoc tracking module captures and digitizes these patterns. Our study with 14 designers and artists demonstrates how Shape-Kit facilitates sensorial exploration for expressive haptic design. We analyze how designers collaboratively ideate, prototype, iterate, and compose touch experiences and show the subtlety and richness of touch that can be achieved through diverse crafting methods with Shape-Kit. Reflecting on the findings, our work contributes key insights into haptic toolkit design and touch design practices centered on the "crafting haptics" metaphor. We discuss in-depth how Shape-Kit's simplicity, though remaining constrained, enables focused crafting for deeper exploration, while its collaborative nature fosters shared sense-making of touch experiences.

Peer Reviewed

ABSTRACT

Driven by the vision of future responsive environments, where everyday surroundings can perceive human behaviors and respond through intelligent robotic actuation, we propose Wizard of Props (WoP): a human-centered design workflow for creating expressive, implicit, and meaningful interactions. This collaborative experience prototyping approach integrates full-scale physical props with Mixed Reality (MR) to support ideation, prototyping, and rapid testing of responsive environments. We present two design explorations that showcase our investigations of diverse design solutions based on varying technology resources, contextual considerations, and target audiences. Design Exploration One focuses on mixed environment building, where we observe fluid prototyping methods. In Design Exploration Two, we explore how novice designers approach WoP, and illustrate their design ideas and behaviors. Our findings reveal that WoP complements conventional design methods, enabling intuitive body-storming, supporting flexible prototyping fidelity, and fostering expressive environment-human interactions through in-situ improvisational performance.

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.

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.

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

We present Electriflow: a new class of soft electrohydraulic actuators as building blocks for prototyping shape-changing interfaces. These actuators are silent and fast in operation and can be fabricated with commodity materials. Electriflow generates an immediate hydraulic force upon electrostatic activation without an external fluid supply source, enabling a simple and compact self-contained design. This paper describes the materials and mechanisms of these shape-changing building blocks, as well as the underlying fabrication process, which includes a software tool that assists in their design, shape visualization and construction. Finally, we explore four classes of application prototypes: tangible animation, actuating origami creases, shape-changing phone, and shape-changing bowl.

HapticBots introduces a novel encountered-type haptic approach for Virtual Reality (VR) based on multiple tabletop-size shape-changing robots. These robots move on a tabletop and change their height and orientation to haptically render various surfaces and objects on-demand. Compared to previous encountered-type haptic approaches like shape displays or robotic arms, our proposed approach has an advantage in deployability, scalability, and generalizability—these robots can be easily deployed due to their compact form factor. They can support multiple concurrent touch points in a large area thanks to the distributed nature of the robots. We propose and evaluate a novel set of interactions enabled by these robots which include: 1) rendering haptics for VR objects by providing just-in-time touch-points on the user’s hand, 2) simulating continuous surfaces with the concurrent height and position change, and 3) enabling the user to pick up and move VR objects through graspable proxy objects. Finally, we demonstrate HapticBots with various applications, including remote collaboration, education and training, design and 3D modeling, and gaming and entertainment.

RoomShift is a room-scale dynamic haptic environment for virtual reality, using a small swarm of robots that can move furniture. RoomShift consists of nine shape-changing robots: Roombas with mechanical scissor lifts. These robots drive beneath a piece of furniture to lift, move and place it. By augmenting virtual scenes with physical objects, users can sit on, lean against, place and otherwise interact with furniture with their whole body; just as in the real world. When the virtual scene changes or users navigate within it, the swarm of robots dynamically reconfigures the physical environment to match the virtual content. We describe the hardware and software implementation, applications in virtual tours and architectural design and interaction techniques.

We present PufferBot, an aerial robot with an expandable structure that may expand to protect a drone's propellers when the robot is close to obstacles or collocated humans. PufferBot is made of a custom 3D-printed expandable scissor structure, which utilizes a one degree of freedom actuator with rack and pinion mechanism. We propose four designs for the expandable structure, each with unique characterizations for different situations. Finally, we present three motivating scenarios in which PufferBot may extend the utility of existing static propeller guard structures.

Large-scale shape-changing interfaces have great potential, but creating such systems requires substantial time, cost, space, and efforts, which hinders the research community to explore interactions beyond the scale of human hands. We introduce modular inflatable actuators as building blocks for prototyping room-scale shape-changing interfaces. Each actuator can change its height from 15cm to 150cm, actuated and controlled by air pressure. Each unit is low-cost (8 USD), lightweight (10 kg), compact (15 cm), and robust, making it well-suited for prototyping room-scale shape transformations. Moreover, our modular and reconfigurable design allows researchers and designers to quickly construct different geometries and to explore various applications. This paper contributes to the design and implementation of highly extendable inflatable actuators, and demonstrates a range of scenarios that can leverage this modular building block.

We present RealitySketch, an augmented reality interface for sketching interactive graphics and visualizations. In recent years, an increasing number of AR sketching tools enable users to draw and embed sketches in the real world. However, with the current tools, sketched contents are inherently static, floating in mid-air without responding to the real world. This paper introduces a new way to embed dynamic and responsive graphics in the real world. In RealitySketch, the user draws graphical elements on a mobile AR screen and binds them with physical objects in real-time and improvisational ways, so that the sketched elements dynamically move with the corresponding physical motion. The user can also quickly visualize and analyze real-world phenomena through responsive graph plots or interactive visualizations. This paper contributes to a set of interaction techniques that enable capturing, parameterizing, and visualizing real-world motion without pre-defined programs and configurations. Finally, we demonstrate our tool with several application scenarios, including physics education, sports training, and in-situ tangible interfaces.

We present Mechamagnets, a technique for facilitating the design and fabrication of haptic and functional inputs for physical interfaces. This technique consists of a set of 3D printed spatial constraints which facilitate different physical movements, as well as unpowered haptic profiles created by embedding static magnets in 3D printed parts. We propose the Mechamagnets taxonomy to map the design space of this technique for designers and makers. Furthermore, we leverage the use of magnets by instrumenting these objects with linear Hall effect sensors to create functional digital inputs. We showcase Mechamagnets with a series of novel physical interfaces made with this technique.

We introduce shape-changing swarm robots. A swarm of self-transformable robots can both individually and collectively change their configuration to display information, actuate objects, act as tangible controllers, visualize data, and provide physical affordances. ShapeBots is a concept prototype of shape-changing swarm robots. Each robot can change its shape by leveraging small linear actuators that are thin (2.5 cm) and highly extendable (up to 20cm) in both horizontal and vertical directions. The modular design of each actuator enables various shapes and geometries of self-transformation. We illustrate potential application scenarios and discuss how this type of interface opens up possibilities for the future of ubiquitous and distributed shape-changing interfaces.

This paper introduces Dynamic 3D Printing, a fast and reconstructable shape formation system. Dynamic 3D Printing can assemble an arbitrary three-dimensional shape from a large number of small physical elements. Also, it can disassemble the shape back to elements and reconstruct a new shape. Dynamic 3D Printing combines the capabilities of 3D printers and shape displays: Like conventional 3D printing, it can generate arbitrary and graspable three-dimensional shapes, while allowing shapes to be rapidly formed and reformed as in a shape display. To demonstrate the idea, we describe the design and implementation of Dynablock, a working prototype of a dynamic 3D printer. Dynablock can form a three-dimensional shape in seconds by assembling 3,000 9 mm blocks, leveraging a 24 x 16 pin-based shape display as a parallel assembler. Dynamic 3D printing is a step toward achieving our long-term vision in which 3D printing becomes an interactive medium, rather than the means for fabrication that it is today. In this paper, we explore possibilities for this vision by illustrating application scenarios that are difficult to achieve with conventional 3D printing or shape display systems.

In this paper, we present AnimaStage: a hands-on animated craft platform based on an actuated stage. Utilizing a pin-based shape changing display, users can animate their crafts made from various materials. Through this system, we intend to lower the barrier for artists and designers to create actuated objects and to contribute to interaction design using shape changing interfaces for inter-material interactions. We introduce a three-phase design process for AnimaStage with examples of animated crafts. We implemented the system with several control modalities that allow users to manipulate the motion of the crafts so that they could easily explore their desired motion through an iterative process. To complement the animated crafts, dynamic landscapes can also be rendered. We conducted a user study to observe the subject and process by which people make crafts using AnimaStage. We invited participants with different backgrounds to design and create crafts using multiple materials and craft techniques. A variety of outcomes and application spaces were found in this study.

Shape changing interfaces give physical shapes to digital data so that users can feel and manipulate data with their hands and bodies. However, physical objects in our daily life not only have shape but also various material properties. In this paper, we propose an interaction technique to represent material properties using shape changing interfaces. Specifically, by integrating the multi-modal sensation techniques of haptics, our approach builds a perceptive model for the properties of deformable materials in response to direct manipulation. As a proof-of-concept prototype, we developed preliminary physics algorithms running on pin-based shape displays. The system can create computationally variable properties of deformable materials that are visually and physically perceivable. In our experiments, users identify three deformable material properties (flexibility, elasticity and viscosity) through direct touch interaction with the shape display and its dynamic movements. In this paper, we describe interaction techniques, our implementation, future applications and evaluation on how users differentiate between specific properties of our system. Our research shows that shape changing interfaces can go beyond simply displaying shape allowing for rich embodied interaction and perceptions of rendered materials with the hands and body.

Pin-based shape displays not only give physical form to digital information, they have the inherent ability to accurately move and manipulate objects placed on top of them. In this paper we focus on such object manipulation: we present ideas and techniques that use the underlying shape change to give kinetic ability to otherwise inanimate objects. First, we describe the shape display's ability to assemble, disassemble, and reassemble structures from simple passive building blocks through stacking, scaffolding, and catapulting. A technical evaluation demonstrates the reliability of the presented techniques. Second, we introduce special kinematic blocks that are actuated and sensed through the underlying pins. These blocks translate vertical pin movements into other degrees of freedom like rotation or horizontal movement. This interplay of the shape display with objects on its surface allows us to render otherwise inaccessible forms, like overhangs, and enables richer input and output.

We propose a new approach to Physical Telepresence, based on shared workspaces with the ability to capture and remotely render the shapes of people and objects. In this paper, we describe the concept of shape transmission, and propose interaction techniques to manipulate remote physical objects and physical renderings of shared digital content. We investigate how the representation of user's body parts can be altered to amplify their capabilities for teleoperation. We also describe the details of building and testing prototype Physical Telepresence workspaces based on shape displays. A preliminary evaluation shows how users are able to manipulate remote objects, and we report on our observations of several different manipulation techniques that highlight the expressive nature of our system.

Recent research in 3D user interfaces pushes towards immersive graphics and actuated shape displays. Our work explores the hybrid of these directions, and we introduce sublimation and deposition, as metaphors for the transitions between physical and virtual states. We discuss how digital models, handles and controls can be interacted with as virtual 3D graphics or dynamic physical shapes, and how user interfaces can rapidly and fluidly switch between those representations. To explore this space, we developed two systems that integrate actuated shape displays and augmented reality (AR) for co-located physical shapes and 3D graphics. Our spatial optical see-through display provides a single user with head-tracked stereoscopic augmentation, whereas our handheld devices enable multi-user interaction through video seethrough AR. We describe interaction techniques and applications that explore 3D interaction for these new modalities. We conclude by discussing the results from a user study that show how freehand interaction with physical shape displays and co-located graphics can outperform wand-based interaction with virtual 3D graphics.

Past research on shape displays has primarily focused on rendering content and user interface elements through shape output, with less emphasis on dynamically changing UIs. We propose utilizing shape displays in three different ways to mediate interaction: to facilitate by providing dynamic physical affordances through shape change, to restrict by guiding users with dynamic physical constraints, and to manipulate by actuating physical objects. We outline potential interaction techniques and introduce Dynamic Physical Affordances and Constraints with our inFORM system, built on top of a state-of-the-art shape display, which provides for variable stiffness rendering and real-time user input through direct touch and tangible interaction. A set of motivating examples demonstrates how dynamic affordances, constraints and object actuation can create novel interaction possibilities.

Malleable and organic user interfaces have the potential to enable radically new forms of interactions and expressiveness through flexible, free-form and computationally controlled shapes and displays. This work, specifically focuses on particle jamming as a simple, effective method for flexible, shape-changing user interfaces where programmatic control of material stiffness enables haptic feedback, deformation, tunable affordances and control gain. We introduce a compact, low-power pneumatic jamming system suitable for mobile devices, and a new hydraulic-based technique with fast, silent actuation and optical shape sensing. We enable jamming structures to sense input and function as interaction devices through two contributed methods for high-resolution shape sensing using: 1) index-matched particles and fluids, and 2) capacitive and electric field sensing. We explore the design space of malleable and organic user interfaces enabled by jamming through four motivational prototypes that highlight jamming's potential in HCI, including applications for tabletops, tablets and for portable shape-changing mobile devices.

Actuated shape output provides novel opportunities for experiencing, creating and manipulating 3D content in the physical world. While various shape displays have been proposed, a common approach utilizes an array of linear actuators to form 2.5D surfaces. Through identifying a set of common interactions for viewing and manipulating content on shape displays, we argue why input modalities beyond direct touch are required. The combination of freehand gestures and direct touch provides additional degrees of freedom and resolves input ambiguities, while keeping the locus of interaction on the shape output. To demonstrate the proposed combination of input modalities and explore applications for 2.5D shape displays, two example scenarios are implemented on a prototype system.

Tangible interactions on horizontal surfaces are increasingly relevant for collaborative applications, embodied interaction, musical performance, and interaction with 3D information. This unique studio opportunity introduces approaches to developing applications on four related platforms: the Reactable: a musical tabletop, and its companion fiducial tracking system reacTIVision, Microsoft Surface: a commercial multi-touch table, MemTable: a large interactive tabletop, and Relief: a responsive 3D surface. It will focus on the unique affordances of multi-input and multi-user event handling shared and afforded by each of the four platforms. Participants will work in small groups within some simplified code templates to develop a small applications focused on co-located input by multiple people, combining the use of tangible objects and touch input.

Relief is an actuated tabletop display, which is able to render and animate three-dimensional shapes with a malleable surface. It allows users to experience and form digital models like geographical terrain in an intuitive manner. The tabletop surface is actuated by an array of 120 motorized pins, which are controlled with a low-cost, scalable platform built upon open-source hardware and software tools. Each pin can be addressed individually and senses user input like pulling and pushing.

In this paper we present g-stalt, a gestural interface for interacting with video.g-stalt is built upon the g-speak spatial operating environment (SOE) from Oblong Industries.The version of g-stalt presented here is realized as a three-dimensional graphical space filled with over 60 cartoons.These cartoons can be viewed and rearranged along with their metadata using a specialized gesture set.gstalt is designed to be chirocentric, spatiotemporal, and telekinetic.

We propose a tangible interface concept for communicating personal financial information in an ambient and relevant manner. The concept is embodied in a set of wallets that provide the user with haptic feedback about personal financial metrics. We describe how such feedback can inform purchasing decisions and improve general financial awareness.