Zooids: Building Blocks for Swarm User Interfaces

Mathieu Le Goc, Lawrence Kim, Ali Parsaei, Jean-Daniel Fekete, Pierre Dragicevic, and Sean Follmer.

Swarm user interfaces are user interfaces built using collections of self-propelled physical objects (e.g., mini robots) that can move collectively and react to user input. Zooids are an open-source open-hardware platform for developing tabletop swarm interfaces.

Video demo (2 min)

https://youtu.be/ZVdAfDMP3m0

Video teaser (30 sec)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ik7V_QH5wk

Conference presentation (20 min)

https://youtu.be/fkg5pQBBAi0

Paper

Mathieu Le Goc, Lawrence Kim, Ali Parsaei, Jean-Daniel Fekete, Pierre Dragicevic, Sean Follmer. Zooids: Building Blocks for Swarm User Interfaces. Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology (UIST 2016), June 2016, Tokyo, Japan. pp.97-109 [pdf]

Slides

Slides for the conference presentation (PDF 70MB)

Poster

Poster used for the UIST demo (PDF 1.6MB)

Make your own Zooids

All the material to create Zooids is available on GitHub. Feel free to fork it, experiment and play with them, and suggest us your ideas for improvement!

Awards

Best Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology (UIST 2016), June 2016, Tokyo, Japan
Honorable Mention at the Fast Company Innovation By Design Awards 2017 (Student Category)

Press

Inria -- New man-machine interface: mini-robots for display and interaction -- en || fr
FastCompany Co.Design -- This Swarm Of Little Robots Is A Totally New Kind Of Interface
Makery -- Zooids: who are these cute robots? -- en || fr
Science et avenir -- Un essaim de robots incroyablement véloces
Gizmodo -- A Future Where Tiny Swarming Robots Bring Me My Phone Is the Future I Want
TechCrunch -- Swarms of tiny, cute robots will one day bring you your phone, like this
Elektor -- Zooids: Building Blocks for Swarm User Interfaces
Adafruit -- ‘Zooids’ are Open-Source, Open-Hardware ‘Bots for ‘Swarm User Interfaces’
A video posted on Facebook got 12 millions views, 86,000 likes and 65,000 shares.

Acknowledgments

This is a joint work with the Shape Lab at Stanford University (USA). It was partially funded by the Région Ile de France, DIM ISC-PIF. We would also like to thank Alexa Siu, Shenli Yuan, Ernesto Ramirez and Pham Minh Hieu for investing so much time and efforts in making this work possible.