MorphBenches: Using mixed reality experimentation platforms to study dynamic affordances in shape-changing devices

Abstract The shape-changing community struggles to understand the science behind interaction with shape-changing devices because the technologies needed to build those devices are at their infancy or confined in research labs. To allow researchers to gather empirical data and accelerate the vision of shape-changing devices, we need experimentation platforms to further our understanding of dynamic affordances without the need of physical prototypes. To do this we propose to use Mixed Reality (MR). We discuss the advantages and drawbacks of different techniques along the MR continuum, i.e. from Augmented Reality (AR) to Virtual Reality (VR). To investigate whether MR is a viable approach for studying dynamic affordances we then implemented an experimentation platform using projected AR. Our platform is particularly close to physical reality as it can change the visual appearance of a real object (for example make it appears hollow). We demonstrate the usage of our platform via a case study exposing participants’ verbalizations of perceived experiences across different visual effects. Results show that elementary projected AR can create convincing illusions of transforming objects to study their perceived affordances.