Dynamic Pinhole Paper: Interacting with Horizontal Displays through Perforated Paper

Abstract

Ubiquitous nature, versatility, and durability enabled paper to maintain its importance in the digital age. It is not surprising there have been numerous attempts to combine paper with the digital content. One way to do so is to place paper on a horizontal interactive display (e.g. tabletop or tablet). The paper thus becomes "the screen" on which the digital content is viewed, yet it also acts as a barrier that degrades the quality of the perceived image. This research tries to address this problem by proposing and evaluating a novel paper display concept called Dynamic pinhole paper. The concept is based on perforating the paper (to decrease its opacity) and moving digital content beneath the perforated area (to increase the resolution). To evaluate this novel concept, we fabricated the pinhole paper and implemented the software in order to run multiple user studies exploring the concept’s viability, optimal movement trajectory (amount, direction and velocity), and the effect of perforation on printing, writing and reading. The results show that the movement of digital content is a highly effective strategy for improving the resolution of the digital content through perforation where the optimal velocity is independent from trajectory direction (e.g. horizontal or circular) and amount of movement. Results also show the concept is viable on of the shelf hardware and that it is possible to write and print on perforated paper.