PickCells

A Physically Reconfigurable Cell-composed Touchscreen

 Overview

Touchscreens are the predominant medium for interactions with digital services; however, their current fixed form factor narrows the scope for rich physical interactions by limiting interaction possibilities to a single, planar surface. In this paper we introduce the concept of PickCells, a fully re-configurable device concept composed of cells, that breaks the mould of rigid screens and explores a modular system that affords rich sets of tangible interactions and novel across-device relationships. Through a series of co-design activities -- involving HCI experts and potential end-users of such systems -- we synthesised a design space aimed at inspiring future research, giving researchers and designers a framework in which to explore modular screen interactions. The design space we propose unifies existing works on modular touch surfaces under a general framework and broadens horizons by opening up unexplored spaces providing new interaction possibilities. This project explored the PickCells concept, a design space of modular touch surfaces, and proposed a toolkit for quick scenario prototyping.

 Research Concept

 System Demonstration

Tangible Passwords

Minimalism

Crowd Contribution

 Main Video

 Publications

Paper Alix Goguey, Cameron Steer, Andrés Lucero, Laurence Nigay, Deepak Ranjan Sahoo, Céline Coutrix, Anne Roudaut, Sriram Subramanian, Yutaka Tokuda, Timothy Neate, Jennifer Pearson, Simon Robinson, Matt Jones. 2019. PickCells: A Physically Reconfigurable Cell-composed Touchscreen. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'19), pp.1--14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300503   PDF [11MB]

 Press Coverage