Zooids is an open-source open-hardware platform for developing tabletop Swarm User Interfaces, a new class of human-computer interfaces comprised of many autonomous robots that handle both display and interaction.

The platform consists of a collection of custom-designed wheeled micro robots each 2.6 cm in diameter, a radio base-station, a highspeed DLP structured light projector for optical tracking, and a software framework for application development and control.
A set of application scenarios developed with Zooids show the potential of tabletop swarm user interfaces through .
 

Read more general design considerations unique to swarm user interfaces in this gripping publication by Mathieu Le Goc, Lawrence Kim, Ali Parsaei, Jean-Daniel Fekete, Pierre Dragicevic, Sean Follmer. The creators hope others will make their own Zooids to experiment with. Last month, this French team earned the best paper award at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Tokyo.
UIST is the premier forum for innovations in human-computer interfaces, bringing together people from diverse areas including graphical & web user interfaces, tangible & ubiquitous computing, virtual & augmented reality, multimedia, new input & output devices, and CSCW.

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