UCLIC Research Seminar Series

We need physicality in computing now more than ever, and shape displays may help us reclaim it. While socially distant, our daily experience of work and learning is a stark reminder that videos on a flat computer screen cannot replace the intimacy of touch and the sense of presence when sharing a room. My students and I challenge this status quo by inventing physical interfaces that transform their shape to represent information and people. Our group's work on prototyping tools for shape-changing interfaces and on technologies like shape-changing swarm robots is driven by a shared vision of a future of embodied interaction and remote togetherness beyond pixels. I will discuss ideas on how these interfaces can enrich remote experiences, and what advances will be needed to turn them from lab prototypes into reality.

Papers:
Daniel Leithinger, Sean Follmer, Alex Olwal, and Hiroshi Ishii. 2014. Physical telepresence: shape capture and display for embodied, computer-mediated remote collaboration. In Proceedings of the 27th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 461-470. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2642918.2647377

Ryo Suzuki, Hooman Hedayati, Clement Zheng, James L. Bohn, Daniel Szafir, Ellen Yi-Luen Do, Mark D. Gross, and Daniel Leithinger. 2020. RoomShift: Room-scale Dynamic Haptics for VR with Furniture-moving Swarm Robots. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1-11. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376523