Polka Dot – The Garden of Water Spirits

Physical and tangible representations of information have provided users with intuitive interactions in which users can control the information through the tangible controls using their hands. In these techniques, flexible materials such as clay have been focused on. Though these tangible representations of information accept user’s input, they cannot provide bi-directional physical interactions since their physical properties are not controlled by the computers. Therefore, it is difficult to represent dynamic changes of information using such physical properties as motion, size, and color. These tangible user interfaces employ static materials.
Thus, we focus on liquid water as a more flexible material that can easily change their various physical properties. We propose a fabric tabletop display called Polka Dot, which can control various properties of the water drops on its surface. We propose a novel tabletop system called “Polka dot”. This tabletop system can control various properties such as position, motion, shape, size, and color of the water drops on its surface. The system consists of a large piece of the water-repellent fabric and an array of actuators under the fabric. Since the water drops on the water-repellent fabric easily slide to lower area by gravity, the system can control the movement of the water drops by controlling the unevenness of the fabric using underlying actuators. The system is also able to expand (or reduce) the size of the water drops by injecting (or extracting) the water from the back side of the fabric. This flexibility makes it easy to represent dynamic changes of information. Moreover, water drops can be colored so easily that colorful representations can be realized by using coloring agents or projection mapping techniques and so on. Users can interact with the water drops by gestures, touching them directly, and using the other tangibles.

Yohei Kojima
Osaka University

Yuichi Itoh
Osaka University

Taku Fujimoto
Osaka University

Kosuke Nakajima
Osaka University