Designing Safe 2.5D Tangible Shape Displays

Abstract

2.5D shape display is a recent idea in the market that emerged as a platform of interaction between a computer and human. 2.5D shape display is essentially a grid-like matrix consisting of actuators and pins moving up and down in vertical motion to create pseudo-3D images. Focused as a visual display in some applications and as a medium of input or output in others, this technology holds a lot of potentials to be explored in present and future applications since it is a unique type of hardware that can actually show images in a real world. Recently, many such platforms have been created by the use of different hardware solutions and have found applications in gaming interface, physical telepresence, dynamic objects etc. Some research areas that can still be explored are applications for the blind, building and object modelling etc. With advances in applications, there is a need for hardware with higher resolution at a lower cost. Also, being an interact-able display, safety and comfort of the user is of utmost importance. This has been seen to be lacking in the existing projects. In this thesis, we focus on designing a prototype for building a safe display with minimal cost. We then go on to understand safety and comfort for the chosen display prototype and design some safe actuation algorithms. These are later evaluated using a combination of an experimental survey and simulation to find and propose a good solution for safe 2.5D shape displays.