everyone my name is sai i'm a phd
student at the human computer
interaction institute
at carnegie mellon university today i'll
be talking about our project opi
structures
now this project is joint work with
collaborators from civil and
environmental engineering
now before we begin going into the
details i would like to show you 20
seconds what we mean by optistructures
as you can see these are structures that
are typically passive but are responsive
to human interaction
now if you look around us human
environments are surrounded by
structural elements like
walls hallways beams that are pervasive
and are yet just mostly passive
so one key question we wanted to answer
with this project was
how can we design structures to be
interactive at room scale
in prior work researchers have looked at
fabrication and material-oriented
approaches to bring large-scale
interactivity
living wall projects use paper-based
electronics to bring large area
interaction and displays
at the surface this technique however
doesn't enable room-scale interaction
a more recent project wallplus plus
looked at painting antennas on walls to
track user activity and interaction at
room scale
this project missed out on providing
visual feedback to the users
most recently sprayable in user
interfaces
this year brings interactivity to large
scale surfaces
by spraying conductive materials again
here the interaction worked at the
surface level but at room scales further
away from the structures
interaction possibilities were limited
so to summarize
providing visual feedback and room scale
interactivity simultaneously was missing
now that's exactly the idea behind
optistructures we wanted to use optical
fibers to enable room
scale interaction and provide visual
feedback in structures
now let's take a look at how it all
works
if you have an optical fiber of any
length and we pass light on one end
then the light comes out on the other
end this is relatively simple
but how can we use optical fibers for
sensing
let's take an optical fiber and look at
what happens first
we shine a broad spectrum laser source
through the fiber now this produces an
optical pulse now this pulse moves along
the fiber
until it reaches a grading that's
purposefully placed in the middle of the
fiber
if you look closely at the greeting when
the optical pulse passes through one end
then there are two things that happen
here first a reflected signal comes
through
the same end through which it was passed
and the remaining transmitted signal is
produced to the other end
now while all this is happening if a
vibration occurs
then the vibration causes a shift in the
reflected signal and the transmitted
signal
now the shifted reflected signal is
carried all the way back
to the source where the detector can
then detect the change in the vibration
finally the remaining transmitted signal
can be carried further along the optical
fiber and can be used for sensing
activities at other locations along the
fiber
so until now we've looked at how optical
fibers can be used for
both sensing and displays now let's look
at how optical fibers can be integrated
into the structures
first a mole displace for casting
structure
next we use a custom designed optical
fiber extruder to programmatically place
fibers
after placing the sensing and display
fibers materials are casted onto the
mold
now after the after that the casted
structure can be retrofitted
into existing walls or can be used
passes
they can be used for both display
sensing or both
now there are many applications with
these type of structures
i'm going to show you a few examples to
give you an idea
first an interactive contact directory
on the wall can be used to find out
where a person is located
second we can proactively give safety
alerts
to people while they're doing any
activity
now there are many more interesting
examples and material experiments in the
paper
in the interest of time i invite you all
to look into the paper for further
details
to summarize we introduced a method to
to create room scale interactive
structures
for sensing and visual feedback now
we're really excited
about taking this approach further in
the future we aim to have the ability to
sense activities in structures
that are spanning large infrastructures
and even to cd scales
now all of this is possible without
needing any battery or maintenance
with that i would like to end my talk
here i thank you for your attention
and i'm now open to questions