Chandelier: A Surrounding Mid-Air Tangible Interface
Published in UIST '23 Adjunct, 2023
We present Chandelier, a mid-air tangible interface where a user is surrounded in the center of 120 pendants that levitate independently and orbit in 5 concentric circumferences, where each pendant is touch-enabled and color-changeable by default. We explore interactions with Chandelier and build 4 embodying applications: performing 3D special effects, looping music composition, endless tangible side-scrolling games, and personal physical immersion. These applications not only showcase the experiences of Chandelier being a surrounding shape display but also bring in techniques such as change blindness and repurposing formations from immersive experiences to mitigate the limitation of the hardware systems. We discuss the constraints and trade-offs in our system design, the extent of Surrounding Mid-Air interactions in tangible interfaces, and the design factors that could be brought into experiences of future levitation interfaces.