Antonio Gomes, Andrea Nesbitt, and Roel Vertegaal. 2013. MorePhone: a study of actuated shape deformations for flexible thin-film smartphone notifications. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13). [Paper]
MorePhone is an actuated flexible smartphone with a thin-film E Ink display. MorePhone uses shape memory alloys to actuate the entire surface of the display as well as individual corners. We conducted a participatory study to determine how users associate urgency and notification type with full screen, 1 corner, 2 corner and 3 corner actuations of the smartphone. Results suggest that with the current prototype, actuated shape notifications are useful for visual feedback. Urgent notifications such as alarms and voice calls were best matched with actuation of the entire display surface, while less urgent notifications, such as software notifications were best matched to individual corner bends. While different corner actuations resulted in significantly different matches between notification types, medium urgency notification types were treated as similar, and best matched to a single corner bend. A follow-up study suggested that users prefer to dedicate each corner to a specific type of notification. Users would like to personalize the assignment of corners to notification type. Animation of shape actuation significantly increased the perceived urgency of any of the presented shapes.
morephone (2013) first shape changing smartphone
morephone (2013): phone call notification (side view)
morephone (2013): phone call notification
morephone (2013): message notification (close up)
