ShadowLamp

The ShadowLamp is a lamp concept supporting controllable shadow casting for displaying ambient information. The concept uses electrochromic displays to mask a light source and control the projected shadows. We implemented a prototype in a hexagon frame with six separately controlled LEDs compartmentalized to cast shadows in 60° angles. Alongside the LEDs, each compartment contains an electrochromic display for shadow control. As a use case, we fabricated displays to support a children’s book. The changing shadows adding an ambient element to the story’s progress. The displays and LEDs are controlled by a Bluetooth connected Android application running on a smartphone.
Published as: Walther Jensen, Markus Löchtefeld, and Hendrik Knoche. 2019. ShadowLamp: An Ambient Display with Controllable Shadow Projection using Electrochromic Materials.. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’19). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3313011