Hey Hey,
I'm Willa.
I'm a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Chicago, working with Dr. Ken Nakagaki. My research interests lie primarily in tangible interaction, digital fabrication, and actuation technology. I am developing versatile, user-friendly actuators that seamlessly enhance everyday objects by creating motion, shape change, and haptics. By adaptively changing function, these actuators transform our interactions with the physical world. Outside of research I like reading, writing, and bouldering.
email: yunqiy at uchicago dot edu
I'm a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Chicago, working with Dr. Ken Nakagaki. My research interests lie primarily in tangible interaction, digital fabrication, and actuation technology. I am developing versatile, user-friendly actuators that seamlessly enhance everyday objects by creating motion, shape change, and haptics. By adaptively changing function, these actuators transform our interactions with the physical world. Outside of research I like reading, writing, and bouldering.
email: yunqiy at uchicago dot edu
Publications
ThrowIO: Actuated TUIs that Facilitate ``Throwing and Catching'' Spatial Interaction with Overhanging Mobile Wheeled Robots
Ting-Han Lin, Willa Yunqi Yang, Ken Nakagaki
We introduce ThrowIO, a novel style of actuated tangible user interface that facilitates throwing and catching spatial interaction powered by mobile wheeled robots on overhanging surfaces. In our approach, users throw and stick objects that are embedded with magnets to an overhanging ferromagnetic surface where wheeled robots can move and drop them at desired locations, allowing users to catch them. The thrown objects are tracked with an RGBD camera system to perform closed-loop robotic manipulations. By computationally facilitating throwing and catching interaction, our approach can be applied in many applications including kinesthetic learning, gaming, immersive haptic experience, ceiling storage, and communication.
Reconfigurable Elastic Metamaterials
Willa Yunqi Yang, Yumeng Zhuang, Luke Darcy, Grace Liu, Alexandra Ion
We present a novel design for materials that are reconfigurable by end-users. Conceptually, we propose decomposing such reconfigurable materials into (1) a generic, complex material consisting of engineered microstructures (known as metamaterials) designed to be purchased and (2) a simple configuration geometry that can be fabricated by end-users to fit their individual use cases. Specifically, in this paper we investigate reconfiguring our material’s elasticity, such that it can cover existing objects and thereby augment their material properties. Users can configure their materials by generating the configuration geometry using our interactive editor, 3D printing it using commonly available filaments, and pressing it onto the generic material for local coupling.
