Demo Hour

DEMO HOUR: Zooids

Swarm user interfaces are a new class of human-computer interface comprising many autonomous robots that handle both display and interaction. Zooids is an open-source, open-hardware platform for developing tabletop swarm interfaces. The platform consists of a collection of custom-designed wheeled micro robots, each 2.6 cm in diameter, a radio base station, a high-speed digital-light processing (DLP) structured light projector for optical tracking, and a software framework for application development and control. We have explored the potential of tabletop swarm user interfaces through a set of application scenarios developed with Zooids and proposed general design considerations unique to swarm user interfaces.

Le Goc, M. et al. Zooids: Building blocks for swarm user interfaces. Proc. of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology. ACM, New York, 2016, 97–109.

http://www.aviz.fr/swarmui

http://shape.stanford.edu/research/swarm/

Mathieu Le Goc, Inria and Université Paris-Sud, [email protected]

Lawrence H. Kim, Stanford University, [email protected]

Ali Parsaei, Stanford University, [email protected]

Jean-Daniel Fekete, Inria, [email protected]

Pierre Dragicevic, Inria, [email protected]

Sean Follmer, Stanford University, [email protected]

Zooids can be used on any horizontal surface, such as a tabletop.

The small form factor of Zooids allows you to manipulate a handful of them.