xPrint: A Modularized Liquid Printer for Smart Materials Deposition
Designing New Materials and Manufacturing Techniques
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Wang, Guanyun
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Yao, Lining
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Wang, Wen
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Ou, Jifei
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Cheng, Chin-Yi
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Ishii, Hiroshi
Proceedings of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2016-05-07
v.1
p.5743-5752
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: To meet the increasing requirements of HCI researchers who are looking into
using liquid-based materials (e.g., hydrogels) to create novel interfaces, we
present a design strategy for HCI researchers to build and customize a
liquid-based smart material printing platform with off-the-shelf or
easy-to-machine parts. For the hardware, we suggest a magnetic assembly-based
modular design. These modularized parts can be easily and precisely
reconfigured with off-the-shelf or easy-to-machine parts that can meet
different processing requirements such as mechanical mixing, chemical reaction,
light activation, and solution vaporization. In addition, xPrint supports an
open-source, highly customizable software design and simulation platform, which
is applicable for simulating and facilitating smart material constructions.
Furthermore, compared to inkjet or pneumatic syringe-based printing systems,
xPrint has a large range of printable materials from synthesized polymers to
natural micro-organism-living cells with a printing resolution from 10μm up
to 5mm (droplet size). In this paper, we will introduce the system design in
detail and three use cases to demonstrate the material variability and the
customizability for users with different demands (e.g., designers, scientific
researchers, or artists).