Di Wu, Emily Guan, Yunjia Zhang, Hsuanju Lai, Qiuyu Lu, Lining Yao . ACM CHI 2024 PDF | DOI

Emily Guan, Di Wu, Qiuyu Lu, Lining Yao. ACM CHI EA 2024 PDF | DOI

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We print wax on the paper and turn the composite into a sequentially-controllable, moisture-triggered, rapidly-fabricated, and low-cost shape-changing interface. This technique relies on a sequential control method that harnesses two critical variables: gray levels and water amount. By integrating these variables within a bilayer structure, composed of a paper substrate and wax layer, we produce a diverse wax pattern using a solid inkjet printer. These patterns empower wax paper actuators with rapid control over sequential deformations, harnessing various bending degrees and response times, which helps to facilitate the potential of swift personal actuator customization. Our exploration encompasses the material mechanism, the sequential control method, fabrication procedures, primitive structures, and evaluations. Additionally, we introduce a user-friendly software tool for design and simulation. Lastly, we demonstrate our approach through applications across four domains: agricultural seeding, interactive toys and art, home decoration, and electrical control.

(a) Relationship between bending curvature and responding time for waxpaper samples with front side gray levels from 10% to 50% with one time spray;

(b) Morphing process for waxpaper samples with front gray level of 10%. Sample size for each curve: n=1.

(c) Testing samples in different gray levels;

(d) Experiment setups;

(e) Relationship between gray levels and bending curvature. Sample size for each gray level: n=3; (f) Relationship between gray levels and responding speed. Sample size for each gray level: n=3.

This Interactivity demonstrates a design tool that aids the design and simulation of waxpaper actuators. The waxpaper actuator is a sequentially-controllable, moisture-triggered, rapidly-fabricated, and low-cost shape-changing interface. We introduce a design tool that integrates the characteristic data of the waxpaper actuator to aid users in the customization of swift personal actuators. It uses gray levels to control the wax interface’s deformations, bending degrees and response times. Users can design their own actuators or import samples we provide, customize variables to best fit their needs, and create simulations to preview the performance. This gives higher precision to the effectiveness of the waxpaper actuator before it is fabricated.

Emily Guan, Di Wu, Qiuyu Lu, and Lining Yao. 2024. Design and Simulation Tool for Sequentially and Conditionally Programmable Waxpaper Morphing Interfaces. In Extended Abstracts of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 399, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3648661