Digital clay: architecture designs for shape-generating mechanisms

This paper examines the kinematic design of digital clay, a new type of computer interface that creates 3-D shapes that a user can interact with. After enumerating the design specifications for the digital clay, a new set of kinematic architectures is introduced: the formable crust architectures. These formable crust mechanisms can form shapes in much the same way a piece of fabric would and have tremendous potential for shape generation. Two measures, the surface freedom measure and the freedom from ground measure, are introduced to aid in evaluating potential designs. Finally, the various architectures are evaluated and compared.