Marelo Coelho, Lyndl Hall and Joanna Berzowska have developed a series of techniques for building sensors, actuators and circuit boards that behave, look, and feel like paper.

By embedding electro-active inks, conductive threads and smart materials directly into paper during the papermaking process, they have created seamless composites that are capable of supporting new and unexpected application domains in ubiquitous and pervasive computing at affordable costs.

Pulp-Based Computing: A Framework for Building Computers Out of Paper from Marcelo Coelho on Vimeo.

Relief, created by Daniel Leithinger, Adam Kumpf and Hiroshi Ishii is an actuated tabletop display which is able to render and animate three-dimensional shapes with a malleable surface. A direct extension of this work, Recompose created by Matthew Blackshaw, Anthony DeVincenzi, Dávid Lakatos, Daniel Leithinger and Hiroshi Ishii, is the gesture control of such actuated surface.

By collectively utilizing the body as a tool for direct manipulation alongside gestural input for functional manipulation, we show how a user is afforded unprecedented control over an actuated surface. We describe a number of interaction techniques exploring the shared space of direct and gestural input, demonstrating how their combined use can greatly enhance creation and manipulation beyond unaided human capability.

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