Hello, I am Vivian Chan.
I would like to present Texel blocks.
This work is done by me
and my fellows from National Taiwan University. In this work, we would
like to explore the possibilities of dynamic surfaces, and moreover, interactions
that involves material's spectacular physical properties.
This is a picture of one TexelBlock.
Each block is a basic component of a dynamic surface.
and can be plugged into a controller board into a matrix
of various size.
Let's now take a look at a TexelBlock's structure.
The crawler belt wrapped around the block has material patches attached to it.
In this prototype,
there are six types of materials on each belt.
Each type of material is sliced into thin pieces
so that even rigid materials can rotate around the block.
Three gears drives the crawler belt motorized by a servo motor
in the center.
The frame of the block is made by six pieces of
laset-cutted two millimeters acrylic boards.
Lastly there is an RGB sensor installed at the center for encoding.
It recognizes the color marker attached inside the belts for the
software system to know which material is presented on top of the TexelBlock.
We combined 24 blocks into a
surface for the applications
we want to explore in this work.
First we demonstrated a mockup of a context aware surface, where users
place beverages with different temperatures onto the table, and the table dynamically
switches its surface to the desired material that either absorbs the
water from icy soda or insulates the heat from hot cocoa.
Next a touchable photo frame is where photos uploaded to our system
gets sliced into 24 pieces and each piece gets categorized into
matching textures. Although currently the capability is largely limited because we only
have six types of materials, we believe that in future
works where the resolution is enhanced and more materials are attached,
this dynamic photo frame
may propose more interesting interactions.
The next application is the immersive storytelling. There are many children's story books
featuring touchable textures along with illustrations. With a dynamic surface,
any storybook or even videos,
cartoons, can be expanded with rich tactile feedback.
Next, we propose two kinds of gaming applications.
First is an embody role-playing game where the map is
on the dynamic surface.
The user taps the surface to indicate where to go, and the surface
ships a display map into a new region.
There are capacity of touch sensors embedded into each TexelBlock.
However, the rotation of the crawler belt interferes with
the touch sensing.
Thus, the touch sensor is not included in the final prototype presented.
The second game is a physical board game based on the board game
monopoly, each material around the board
indicates different events. Each time a player ends a round, the
path changes into random materials.
Each player has an avatar and an HP bar made of polyurethane.
When a player steps onto the sand paper material, the player has
to grind the HP bar on the sand paper as a real
physical form of losing HP.
The avatar has an open circuit on the bottom.
So when a player lands on the copper material, the circuit is connected
And the avatar�s eyes light up.
This is an event of chance or fortune. Entering a chance and
fortunate event. Random blocks of on the board switches into mirror material
the player can use a laser pen to shoot laser onto the
gameboard and see which block the laser reflects onto since the game
is based on the monopoly game, the user can buy estates.
To mark the players� territory.
The player drops the liquid contained inside avatar onto the universal test paper material.
Each avatar contains different types of liquid that has different ph values.
In the future, we will like to iterate through more
generations of prototypes to enhance the speed and stability of TexelBlocks.
We also would like to develop more working prototypes to evaluate dynamic
surfaces of larger scales.
We also want to dive into the unexplored
artistical possibilities in
the topic of dynamic surfaces. To sum up, in this work,
we implemented a working prototype of modular blocks that can be combined into
dynamic surfaces. Moreover we demonstrated physical interactions that utilise the physical properties
of each material itself.
We envision a future where interactive surface simultaneously provide various tactile feedback
and the spectacular physical properties of materials.
Thank you.