Zooids: Building Blocks for Swarm User Interfaces

Mathieu Le Goc (1, 2) , Lawrence H Kim (3) , Ali Parsaei (3) , Jean-Daniel Fekete (2) , Pierre Dragicevic (2) , Sean Follmer (3)

1 UP11 - Université Paris-Sud - Paris 11
2 AVIZ - Analysis and Visualization
3 Department of Mechanical Engineering [Stanford]

This paper introduces swarm user interfaces, a new class of human-computer interfaces comprised of many autonomous robots that handle both display and interaction. We describe the design of Zooids, an open-source open-hardware platform for developing tabletop swarm interfaces. The platform consists of a collection of custom-designed wheeled micro robots each 2.6 cm in diameter, a radio base-station, a high-speed DLP structured light projector for optical tracking, and a software framework for application development and control. We illustrate the potential of tabletop swarm user interfaces through a set of application scenarios developed with Zooids, and discuss general design considerations unique to swarm user interfaces.

Keywords: Swarm user interfaces; Tangible user interfaces

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Human-Computer Interaction [cs.HC]

Mathieu Le Goc, Lawrence H Kim, Ali Parsaei, Jean-Daniel Fekete, Pierre Dragicevic, et al.. Zooids: Building Blocks for Swarm User Interfaces. Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), Oct 2016, Tokyo, Japan. ⟨10.1145/2984511.2984547⟩. ⟨hal-01391281⟩