Demo Hour

BitDrones

Issue: XXIII.2 March + April 2016
Page: 8
Digital Citation
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Authors:
Calvin Rubens, Sean Braley, Antonio Gomes, Daniel Goc, Xujing Zhang, Juan Pablo Carrascal, Roel Vertegaal

BitDrones allows users to explore virtual 3D information by interacting with physical self-levitating building blocks. It is a first step toward interactive programmable matter—materials capable of changing their 3D shape in a programmable fashion—via swarms of nano quadcopters. Researchers at the Human Media Lab created three types of BitDrones: PixelDrones are equipped with one LED and a small dot-matrix display. ShapeDrones have a lightweight mesh on a 3D-printed geometric frame and serve as building blocks for complex 3D models. And DisplayDrones lift a curved flexible high-resolution touchscreen and a forward-facing video camera.

www.hml.queensu.ca/bitdrones/

Rubens, C., Braley, S., Gomes, A., Goc, D., Zhang, X., Carrascal, J-P, and Vertegaal, R. BitDrones: Towards self-levitating programmable matter via interactive 3D quadcopter displays. Proc. of ACM UIST'15 User Interface Software and Technology Symposium. ACM Press, 2015.

Calvin Rubens, Sean Braley, Antonio Gomes, Daniel Goc, Xujing Zhang, Juan Pablo Carrascal, and Roel Vertegaal, Human Media Lab, Queen's University
[email protected]