Avoiding Collisions when Interacting with Levitating Particle Displays

Abstract

Levitating particle displays are an emerging technology where content is composed of physical pixels. Unlike digital displays, manipulating the content is not straightforward because physical constraints affect the placement and movement of each particle: dragging a particle may cause it to collide with others along its movement path. We describe initial work into four new interaction techniques that allow users to avoid collisions when directly manipulating display content. Techniques such as these are required for interactive levitating displays to be practical when scaled up to large sizes.

ArticuLev: An Integrated Self-Assembly Pipeline for Articulated Multi-Bead Levitation Primitives

“…While the pipeline provides a self-contained system enabling novel types of levitated applications, its individual components can be improved and further generalized in the future. Our evaluation showed how the inclusion of collision avoidance strategies [28] to the Assemble stage could prevent some failure cases. In addition, adopting recent levitation algorithms like GS-PAT [12] could further increase robustness and provide full PoV content support (i.e.…”

“…a bead going near/through a thread primitive). Thus, collision avoidance mechanisms for levitation [28] should be considered to avoid these cases. In other cases, failures could be related to specifically ill-posed arrangements of the traps (some arrangements lead to destructive interference [19]), which can be alleviated using alternative levitation algorithms (e.g., IBP [15] or GS-PAT [12]).…”

OptiTrap: Optimal Trap Trajectories for Acoustic Levitation Displays

“…Several practical aspects have been explored around such displays, such as selection [Freeman et al 2018] and manipulation techniques [Bachynskyi et al 2018], content detection and initialisation [Fender et al 2021] or collision avoidance [Reynal et al 2020].…”

TipTrap: A Co-located Direct Manipulation Technique for Acoustically Levitated Content.

“…Minimum distances between particles must be considered to disambiguate the specific particle being selected, as well as to allow enough space for the users' hands and fingers. Collision avoidance algorithms should also be considered [43].…”