Hi, I'm Hila Mor from the Tangible Media Group in MIT Media Lab
And today I will be presenting
Venous Materials: toward Interactive fluidic mechanisms
So what is Venous Materials?
It is a novel approach of programmable material
using interactive fluidic mechanisms
We define these fluidic mechanisms as embedded analog sensors and displays
that response to physical deformation input.
This project is inspired by venous structures ubiquitous throughout nature
and in the human body.
And beyond the functionalities fluids that are transmitted through the veins,
these structures can be used as analog indicators and sensors.
For example, veins in leaves transmit pigments which drive the color change-
which then informs us of the leaf’s internal condition
and also which season it is.
Embedding interactivity in the material itself has been explored
in programmable materials in HCI.
the main idea of this research is that the researchers pre-program
the properties of the material to respond to specific external input,
such as mechanical force, heat and humidity and pneumatic and fluidics.
and in pneumatic and fluidics, most of the research is using external pump
to actuate the inflation or the flow, and we take a different approach in this paper
Researchers in the field of Microfluidics,
expertise the manipulation of fluids at the micro scale.
They created ‘lab on a chip’ applications, on skin devices, autonomous soft robotics,
sensing and integrated biological systems.
All this research is really interesting to us,
and here, in this project, we utilize the microfluidics technology to create
a new type, a new category of interactive programmable fluidic mechanisms
So our approach in this paper is that we consider the fluid as the medium to drive
the tangible information, and at the same time, to function as a responsive display
of this information.
The charachteristics of our material, is that, first, it's deformable -
so the deformation is what's driving the flow through the materials. and it's also
makes it self contained, so there is no need of bettery or any external pump.
It's also transparent, so the user can see through the logic and the structure
of the flow. And we use minimal amount of components,
so it's easy to manufacture and recycle.
So today we are going to talk about this very basic mechanism and architecture
that we studied and developed. From this very basic mechanism we created different
configurations as you can see in the back of this slide.
To do that, we will go through the mechanism, the design space,
the design and simulation tool , the fabrication process and the applications.
So Let's start from the basdic architechture of the mechanism.
so we have the sillicone substrate material
and within this material we have a fluidic channel
that is connected to fluid repository, which contains the fluid material
and also connected to air repository
So the way the system works is that when we apply pressure on the fluid
repository the air in the air repository compress and the fluid flows
through the channel.
so that's the basic architechture.
but by changing each parameter in this architechture,
we can really program and control the interactivity of the material.
so now we will see how we do it in the Design Space.
and we will go through each part : flow and display, compositions,
deformation inputs and utilities.
So let's strart from Flow and Display.
in the flow primitives, we start from very basic flow behaviour
which is : scontinous, split, merge, intersect or irreversible.
and we combine these flow primitives to create more complex geometry patterns
as you see on the right.
We also created multicolor primitives, which is: mixing, overlay,
gradient and interweave.
Deformation inputs, is what's driving the flow through the material.
Venous Materials can respond to various deformation inputs,
such as pressuree, which contains: pressure point, area, and a slider.
and more complex deformations such as: bending streching and twisting.
We have two types of compositions. We have layers compositions,
with single layer, multylayer isolated, and connected multilayer, which is 2.5D.
and we also have I/O spatial compotisions, where input and the output are either
transmitted over distance or co-located on the same location.
So, with all the primitives that I just showed, we created Utilities.
Which is the basic functionalities that we use to design
the interaction with Venous Materials.
And we have two typed of Utilities, pressure visualization
and dynamic motion display.
today I want do highlight one of the more interesting utilities that we achieved,
which is that beyond the real time response we can capture the presssure
as a memory in the material.
and here we capture the droplets in the mesh geometry
to represent the increasing applied pressure.
In this second example of memory utility,
we use both mixing and branching to \capture the pressure memory
in the central repository.
so, here you can see the pressure reach the first branching point
and pressure level, and mix with the pink.
and here you can see the fluid reach the secong pressure level, which is blue,
and mixing to create purple and indicate
this is a higher amount of pressure
So now that we went through the design space, we can see Venous Materials
has more complex flow behavior and deign geometries.
these might not intuitive to understand and design
So one of the questions that motivated us was how can allow designers and
researchers to plan and simulate Venous materials?
so we created the design and simulation tool,
which is the first step of our fabrication pipeline.
In the design and simulation tool,
we developed both the tool itself and the UI,
to plan and simulate the flow according to specific deformation input.
and you can see the user first generates the geometry
and then he can modify different parameters
and simulate the flow according to either pressure actuation or bending,
which are the two actuations we implemented
and finally simulate and see the visual result.
Our simulation method aims is to calculate the dynamic flow map
We do that by first, dividing the channels into cells,
and then iteratively comparing between the resistant pressure map
and the actuated pressure map.
The tchnical evaluation included mechanical testing of pressing
and bending and the correspondant flow to this actuations.
We use this data to evaluate and optimize the simulation method.
And this evaluation showed correlation between the simulation result
and the actual fluid flow.
So now that we wenth through the design tool
we can go to the fabrication pipeline
after we prepare the PDMS, we laser engrave the material,
then we manually layer by plasma bonding or self adhesion
and finally we inject the fluid and seal the material.
So how can we embed venous materials in everyday life to create new experiences?
As Venous Material are conformable, they can be embedded in wearables
to visualize on-body motion, pressure and body balance.
they can also be attached on objects for learning activities
And in the shoe example, the shoe prototype is designed to
to visualize the pressure applied on the shoe sole,
while the display is located on the top of the shoe.
This can be used to raise awareness of the users to their body balance
for rehabilitation and dance lessons.
other examples include learning activities,
In learning, it often requires to have granular understanding of the motion
or pressure that one should apply on a piano key or a paint brush.
and this way this can be visualized during the learning process,
using Venous Materials.
In everyday life, everywhere around us, we use graphics: we use signs and lines
and texts and graphs yet - all tese are static.
What if we could use venous material to make these graphics dance?
In this application we enggage the user by giving him the experience of
tangibly manipulating the graphics and the information.
For example, in the Chinese Character application, we utilize the sequesntial
nature of the flow to visualize the order of writing the Chinese letter,
which is very important when learning chinese.
in the graph application we allow the user to dynamically manipulate
and tangibly manipulate the flow and the data.
In packaging, it often requires cheap and simple analog indicators.
and we think Venous Materials has a great potential in this field
to both transmit the information from inside the package to outside,
and also to capture the external pressure as an indicator for the delivery process.
to summarize Venous Materials- is a novel approach of programmable materials
using interactive fluidic mechanisms
To show that, we designed and studied the basic architechture of the mechanism
then we expanded this to a wide design space as a design tool and a toolkit
to designers and researchers
We implenemted a design tool and simulation,
and we developed the fabrication process.
Finally, we demonstrated a vriety of applications.
So what is the next step?
As the title of this paper implies, Venous Materials and the work
in this paper, is the very first step towards a broader research idea
and a vision of interactive fluidic mechanisms.
Beyond the current limitation the is a very exciting future work that we can do,
For example, how can we go beyond 2.5D?
So we think that 3D printing is a really great opportunity
to create more robust and automated fabrication system.
How can we embed more complex logic in the material, to create user interfaces
and embed computational logic as part of that?
And the most interesting thing for us,
is how can we create more advanced interaction modalities?
and the idea that we can introduce to this system any fluidic material
with different propertiers - this can help us to go beyond
visualization to shape changing, or stiffness changing , or other properties,
that are dynamically controlled and programmable, flowing through
the material - this is a really interesting opportunity for us.
The main message of venous Materials,
is this new perspective where fluid as the medium to drive tangible information
and at the same time, to function as a responsive display of this information.
We think this as an important paradigm for HCI.
and with this new paradigm, it's really exciting to think about
how to imagine the world with this new type of interactive fluidic mechanisms
and it's a great opportunity to design these mechanisms to be embeded
in objects across scales and across different functionalities,
from books and packaging, to instruments and wearables and interior design objects
and more.
With that, I would like to thank all of my co-authors on this paper.
and thank you for watching this talk,
and feel free to reach out with any question. Thank you.