Best Practice
Combining Miniturization With Resolution
A significant challenge remains in the availability of small form-factor, minimal weight, and high resolution actuators. In line with more general computing trends, shape-changing interfaces are moving from stationary to mobile to wearable form factors [1, 46], and from rigid to flexible to stretchable and even floating shapes [27, 57, 62, 65]. The use of electromechanical actuators, as is common in many systems (e.g. inFORM [23], PinWheels [45], the BMW Kinetic sculpture [90]), often results in large, heavy, and immobile setups that are not compatible with these demands. In addition, enduser expectations of current interactive systems will demand high-resolution output—Humans’ haptic and visual perception still far exceeds that possible in shape-changing interfaces [48]. However, increasing the shape resolution tends to considerably complicate the technical setup.