2019 Volume 27 Issue 4 Pages 407-411
Electrostatic film actuators are made of thin sheets with embedded electrodes. By utilizing transparent sheets and transparent conductive materials, the whole actuators can be made transparent. Such transparent actuators can be inte-grated with visual displays, such as LCDs. The integrated displays can present rich information to users through com-binations of visual images and physical motions on the same surface. In this article, the basic aspects of electrostatic film actuators are introduced. Then, the integration of the electrostatic actuators with LCD monitors is discussed with some examples. The integrated display can be utilized for amusement purposes or “physicalization” of information. For example, results of physics simulations can be “physicalized” by moving an object using the actuator. The paper also introduces electro-adhesion as another type of electrostatic actuations. Electro-adhesion can also be integrated with visual displays to realize haptic-rendering functions on an LCD surface.
