Section: New Results

Swarm User Interfaces

Participants : Mathieu Le Goc [correspondant] , Lawrence Kim, Ali Parsaei, Jean-Daniel Fekete, Pierre Dragicevic, Sean Follmer.

We introduce swarm user interfaces (Fig 3), a new class of human-computer interfaces comprised of many autonomous robots that handle both display and interaction. We describe the design of Zooids, a hardware and software system: a small wheel-propelled robot with position and touch sensing capabilities that can be freely arranged and repositioned on any horizontal surface, both through user manipulation and computer control. Zooids is an open-source open-hardware platform for developing tabletop swarm interfaces. 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.

More on the project Web page: http://www.aviz.fr/swarmui.