Dynamic physical affordances for shape-changing and deformable user interfaces

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2015.

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Follmer, Sean (Sean Weston)
Other Authors: Hiroshi Ishii.
Format: Thesis
Language:eng
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2015
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/97973
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author Follmer, Sean (Sean Weston)
author2 Hiroshi Ishii.
author_facet Hiroshi Ishii.
Follmer, Sean (Sean Weston)
author_sort Follmer, Sean (Sean Weston)
collection MIT
description Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2015.
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spelling mit-1721.1/979732022-01-18T16:49:28Z Dynamic physical affordances for shape-changing and deformable user interfaces Follmer, Sean (Sean Weston) Hiroshi Ishii. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences. Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences. Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2015. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Includes bibliographical references (pages 207-222). The world is filled with tools and devices designed to fit specific needs and goals, and their physical form plays an important role in helping users understand their use. These physical affordances provide products and interfaces with many advantages: they contribute to good ergonomics, allow users to attend to other tasks visually, and take advantage of embodied and distributed cognition by allowing users to offload mental computation spatially. However, devices today include more and more functionality, with increasingly fewer physical affordances, losing many of the advantages in expressivity and dexterity that our hands can provide. My research examines how we can apply shape-changing and deformable interfaces to address the lack of physical affordances in today's interactive products and enable richer physical interaction with general purpose computing interfaces. In this thesis, I introduce tangible interfaces that use their form to adapt to the functions and ways users want to interact with them. I explore two solutions: 1) creating Dynamic Physical Affordances through shape change and 2) user Improvised Physical Affordances through direct deformation and through appropriation of existing objects. Dynamic Physical Affordances can provide buttons and sliders on demand as an application changes, or even allow users to directly manipulate 3D models or data sets through physical handles which appear out of the data. Improvised Physical Affordances can allow users to squeeze, stretch, and deform input devices to fit their needs, creating the perfect game controller, or shaping a mobile phone around their wrist to form a bracelet. Novel technical solutions are needed to enable these new interaction techniques; this thesis describes techniques both for actuation and robust sensing for shape-changing and deformable interfaces. Finally, systems that utilize Dynamic Physical Affordances and Improvised Physical Affordances are evaluated to understand patterns of use and performance. My belief is that shape-changing UI will become increasingly available in the future, and this work begins to create a vocabulary and design space for more general-purpose interaction for shape-changing UI. by Sean Weston Follmer. Ph. D. 2015-07-31T19:09:51Z 2015-07-31T19:09:51Z 2015 2015 Thesis http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/97973 913967527 eng M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582 222 pages application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology
spellingShingle Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.
Follmer, Sean (Sean Weston)
Dynamic physical affordances for shape-changing and deformable user interfaces
title Dynamic physical affordances for shape-changing and deformable user interfaces
title_full Dynamic physical affordances for shape-changing and deformable user interfaces
title_fullStr Dynamic physical affordances for shape-changing and deformable user interfaces
title_full_unstemmed Dynamic physical affordances for shape-changing and deformable user interfaces
title_short Dynamic physical affordances for shape-changing and deformable user interfaces
title_sort dynamic physical affordances for shape changing and deformable user interfaces
topic Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.
url http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/97973
work_keys_str_mv AT follmerseanseanweston dynamicphysicalaffordancesforshapechanginganddeformableuserinterfaces