Avoiding Collisions when Interacting with Levitating Particle Displays

Levitating particle displays are an emerging technology where content is composed of physical pixels. Unlike digital displays, manipulating the content is not straightforward because physical constraints affect the placement and movement of each particle: dragging a particle may cause it to collide with others along its movement path. We describe initial work into four new interaction techniques that allow users to avoid collisions when directly manipulating display content. Techniques such as these are required for interactive levitating displays to be practical when scaled up to large sizes.