Cubimorph: Designing modular interactive devices

We introduce Cubimorph, a modular interactive device that accommodates touchscreens on each of the six module faces, and that uses a hinge-mounted turntable mechanism to self-reconfigure in the user's hand. Cubimorph contributes toward the vision of programmable matter where interactive devices reconfigure in any shape that can be made out of a chain of cubes in order to fit a myriad of functionalities, e.g. a mobile phone shifting into a console when a user launches a game. We present a design rationale that exposes user requirements to consider when designing homogeneous modular interactive devices. We present our Cubimorph mechanical design, three prototypes demonstrating key aspects (turntable hinges, embedded touchscreens and miniaturization), and an adaptation of the probabilistic roadmap algorithm for the reconfiguration.

I. Introduction

We wish to create interactive devices capable of autonomously changing their shapes in order to create new affordances ¹

The quality of an object to tell us how it wants to be used and how to use it

that help the user to interact. For instance, when launching a game, a phone reconfigures its edges to facilitate grasping with two hands (Fig. 1). There has been a growing interest toward achieving this goal in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community, but yet existing devices consist of folding displays and hardly reach high shape resolution [14] [30]. On the other side, the robotics field has provided many elaborate robot designs especially self-reconfigurable modular ones that are know to be very versatile [23]. For instance Pixelbots [1] act as individual pixels to create a display, Roombots [35] form furniture that can adapt to the user activity, or Topobo [26] allows users to assemble kinetic toys. However if some works have started to consider interactive properties (e.g. Sifteo Cubes), there is still little design care for devices requiring close interaction with people, for example reconfiguring directly in the user's hand.