Kickstarting Application Development for Elastic Displays with Do-it-yourself Hardware Assembly Instructions

Grasping is one of the most important factors of human evolution and even young children start to explore the world by dominantly using touch. However, current interaction technologies suffer from an imbalance between visual and haptic stimulation. Shape-changing interfaces are one line of research addressing this issue. Unfortunately, these systems are often very complex and difficult to replicate. This is not the case for Elastic Displays that have low mechanical complexity and utilize consumer hardware. Albeit their simple setup, neither off-the-shelf hardware for research purposes or instructions on how to assemble such systems are available. This hampers open science and the replication of research results. In this paper, we describe our experiences on constructing an Elastic Display. We present lessons learned from several field tests and the final requirements of the setup. Moreover, we introduce an open source documentation of the hardware assembly instructions, which integrates with a previously published open source software framework. With both hardware and software now being readily available, novel application concepts for Elastic Displays can be explored by a broad community.

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