TuVe: A Shape-changeable Display using Fluids in a Tube

We propose TuVe, a novel shape-changing display consisting of a flexible tube and fluids, in which the droplets flowing through the tube compose the display medium that represents information. In this system, every colored droplet is flowed by controlling valves and a pump connected to the tube. The display part employs a flexible tube that can be shaped to any structure (e.g., wrapped around a specific object), which is achieved by a calibration made to capture the tube structure using image processing with a camera. A performance evaluation reveals that our prototype succeeds in controlling each droplet with a positional error of 2 mm or less, which is small enough to show such simple characters as alphabetic characters using a 7 × 7-pixel resolution display. We also discuss example applications, such as large public displays and flow-direction visualization, that illustrate the characteristics of the TuVe display.