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This paper presents a design space, a fabrication system and applications of creating fluidic chambers and channels at millimeter scale for tangible actuated interfaces. The ability to design and fabricate millifluidic chambers allows one to create high frequency actuation, sequential control of flows and high resolution design on thin film materials. We propose a four dimensional design space of creating these fluidic chambers, a novel heat sealing system that enables easy and precise millifluidics fabrication, and application demonstrations of the fabricated materials for haptics, ambient devices and robotics. As shape-change materials are increasingly integrated in designing novel interfaces, milliMorph enriches the library of fluid-driven shape-change materials, and demonstrates new design opportunities that is unique at millimeter scale for product and interaction design.

We introduce HERMITS, a modular interaction architecture for self-propelled Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) that incorporates physical add-ons, referred to as mechanical shells. The mechanical shell add-ons are intended to be dynamically reconfigured by utilizing the locomotion capability of self-propelled TUIs (e.g. wheeled TUIs, swarm UIs). We developed a proofof-concept system that demonstrates this novel architecture using two-wheeled robots and a variety of mechanical shell examples. These mechanical shell add-ons are passive physical attatchments that extend the primitive interactivities (e.g. shape, motion and light) of the self-propelled robots. The paper proposes the architectural design, interactive functionality of HERMITS as well as design primitives for mechanical shells. The paper also introduces the prototype implementation that is based on an off-the-shelf robotic toy with a modified docking mechanism. A range of applications is demonstrated with the prototype to motivate the collective and dynamically reconfigurable capability of the modular architecture, such as an interactive mobility simulation, an adaptive home/desk environment, and a story-telling narrative. Lastly, Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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