Paddle: Highly Deformable Mobile Devices with Physical Controls

Abstract

We present the concept of highly deformable mobile devices that can be transformed into various special-purpose controls in order to bring physical controls to mobile devices. Physical controls have the advantage of exploiting people's innate abilities for manipulating physical objects in the real world. We designed and implemented a prototype, called Paddle, to demonstrate our concept. Additionally, we explore the interaction techniques enabled by this concept and conduct an in-depth study to evaluate our transformable physical controls. Our findings show that these physical controls provide several benefits over traditional touch interaction techniques commonly used on mobile devices.