Last week I was at the 2017 ACM CHI conference in Denver. The conference covered human-computer interaction topics ranging from accessibility, to education, to new hardware and materials for interacting with computers. When it comes to analyzing what people are doing with input devices, machine learning turned up more often than not. People presented all kinds of outputs including computer-printed food, timed release of perfumes, focused sound waves, and wearables that produce tiny electric currents to actually move your muscles. Interesting news if you’re growing tired of tapping on a keyboard and staring at a screen. It’s time to ponder how we will connect computers to soft, wearable circuits that are not guaranteed to maintain a constant shape, and come up with techniques that let people join and repair the soft electronic materials emerging from labs. Presentation slides are on Slideshare:
(Notes, image credits and references show up if you follow the link)
Here is the associated conference paper:
Our projects are about integrating “functional” materials into larger structures, without damaging the material or the structure. Some examples of functions we want the materials to have are exerting forces, absorbing specific wavelengths, or turning a mechanical stress into an electronic signal. That won’t happen if we melted the material during installation (a real danger when sealing gold nanoparticles into a polymer structure) or if the material destroys the structure that holds on to it. Brian needed to make sure his actuators could output useful forces without melting the plastic of a 3D printed robot body. Thanks to our neighbors at FirstBuild, he was able to check on the temperature of the actuators he made using their thermal imaging camera. After that, he went ahead and made sure the grad students were in good shape.
