LiftTiles

Shape display is a promising approach to general-purpose shape-changing interfaces. Most of the existing pin-based shape displays focus on interactions at the scale of a human hand because of the following three technical challenges when trying to create a larger-size shape display: 1) scalability: common electromechanical linear actuators are difficult to scale to larger sizes due to cost and fabrication complexity. 2) robustness: in a room-scale shape display, each actuator must support heavy objects like a human body, thus it must be robust compared to smaller actuators. 3) deployability: existing shape-changing systems. LiftTiles, a modular and reconfigurable room-scale shape display, consists of an array of retractable and inflatable actuator that is compact (e.g., 15cm tall) and light (e.g., 1.8kg), while extending up to 1.5m to allow for large-scale shape transformation. Inflatable actuation also provides a robust structure that can support heavy objects (e.g., 10 kg weight). 

THING Lab  LiftTiles Website

Publications

• Ryo Suzuki, Ryosuke Nakayama, Dan Liu, Yasuaki Kakehi, Mark D. Gross, and Daniel Leithinger. 2020. LiftTiles: Constructive Building Blocks for Prototyping Room-scale Shape-changing Interfaces. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI '20). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Pages 143–151.
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3374920.3374941 (Sydney, Australia -- Feb. 9-12, 2020)
• Ryo Suzuki, Ryosuke Nakayama, Dan Liu, Yasuaki Kakehi, Mark D. Gross, and Daniel Leithinger. 2019. LiftTiles: Modular and Reconfigurable Room-scale Shape Displays through Retractable Inflatable Actuators. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1-3.
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3332167.3357105 (New Orleans, Louisiana – Oct. 20-23, 2019).