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Jamming user interfaces: programmable particle stiffness and sensing for malleable and shape-changing devices

Published: 07 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    UIST '12: Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
    October 2012
    608 pages
    ISBN:9781450315807
    DOI:10.1145/2380116
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 07 October 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. haptic feedback
    2. jamming
    3. malleable input
    4. organic user interfaces
    5. variable stiffness

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    • (2025)ThreadTessel: A Modularized Tangible Toolkit Leveraging Origami Tessellation for Designing Thread-actuated Shape-changing StructuresProceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3689050.3704929(1-15)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2025
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