RoomShift

Person with VR goggles touches a table that has a Roomba with a mechanical scissor lift below.

RoomShift, a room-scale dynamic haptic environment for virtual reality, consists of nine shape-changing Roomba robots with mechanical scissor lifts that drive beneath and lift, move and place furniture. 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. RoomShift has applications in virtual tours, and architectural design and interaction techniques.

RoomShift was featured in Japanese media on Sept. 7, 2020.

THING Lab    RoomShift Website

 

Associated Researchers

In the News

Publications

Ryo Suzuki, Hooman Hedayati, Clement Zheng, James 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).