Here’s a fun research project that explores how to add physical tangible input to how we interact with our mobile devices. Unlike typical smart phones that are limited to one form factor, Paddle allows its users to customize the shape of the display and transform the display into different layouts with different physical controls. You can switch into a “window to peek” at content, a ring to scroll through lists and even a book-like form factor to leaf through pages.

The project originated out of Haselt University and was created by Raf Ramakers, Johannes Schöning, Kris Luyten. If you are curious about how they accomplish tracking, the researchers use an OptiTrack motion capture system:

Paddle uses an eight-camera OptiTrack system to track the topology of Paddle and a projector to provide visual output. This makes our current prototype entirely passive. By attaching five tiny infrared reflective markers on both sides of every tile, we can track the position and rotation of every tile and distort every region of the projected user interface precisely.

The system was designed and inspired by Rubik’s magic puzzle, a folding plate puzzle. With enough fidelity in the physical controls, you could even picture an interactive Rubix’s Cube or a user guided origami game. Awesome work!

In the author’s own words:

Touch screens have been widely adopted in mobile devices. Although touch input is very flexible in that it can be used for a wide variety of applications on mobile devices, they do not provide physical affordances, encourage eyes-free use or utilize the full dexterity of our hands due to the lack of physical controls. On the other hand, physical controls are often tailored to the task at hand, making them less flexible and therefore less suitable for general purpose use in mobile settings. In this paper, we show how to combine the flexibility of touch screens with the physical qualities that real world controls provide in a mobile context. We do so using a deformable device that can be transformed into various special-purpose physical controls.

We present Paddle, a highly deformable device that can be transformed to different shapes. Paddle bridges the gap between differently sized mobile available devices nowadays, such as phones and tablets. Additionally, Paddle demonstrates a novel opportunity for deformable devices to transform into differently shaped physical controls that provide clear physical affordances for the task at hand. Physical controls have the advantage of exploiting people’s innate abilities for manipulating physical objects in the real world. We designed and implemented a prototyped system of which the engineering principles are based on the design of the Rubik’s magic, a folding plate puzzle. Additionally, we explore the interaction techniques enabled by this concept and conduct an in-depth study to evaluate our transformable physical controls. Our findings show that these physical controls provide several benefits over traditional touch interaction techniques commonly used on mobile devices.