E-Acrylic

Acrylic is a versatile material that offers many desirable qualities for building everyday objects. In addition, acrylic sheets are a staple material for laser cutting in many industrial design maker spaces. As researchers working at the intersection of industrial design and tangible computing, we were already intimately familiar with acrylic as a rapid prototyping material to build structures and enclosures for our physical computing prototypes.

In this research, rather than simply treating acrylic as a material to build physical structures, we saw potential in developing it into an electronic composite—e-acrylic.

We used laser cutting and engraving, along with other manual processes such as painting conductive ink, to incorporate circuits and electronic components into the structure of acrylic sheets. We also explored shaping e-acrylic into 3D objects through common acrylic making processes, such as bending the material with heat and creating complex assemblies with joinery.

With this approach, we built a variety of interactive artifacts with e-acrylic to probe its potential for tangible interaction design and physical computing. These include a game controller, mesh lamp, water level vase, pinball machine, cup warmer, and interactive contour map.

Authors
Bo Han
Xin Liu
Ching Chiuan Yen
Clement Zheng

Assistants
Teo Tze Yang
Zhihan Zeng

CHI 2024

Paper

Approach
We laser engrave the acrylic sheet’s surface that is masked by protective film. We then paint conductive ink into the exposed circuit traces and peel off the film to reveal the circuit. Electronic components are mounted onto e-acrylic with conductive epoxy. We can also shape e-acrylic into 3D objects with joinery or thermoforming.

Example Applications

1—Single sheet game controller

2—Wall lamp

3—Water level vase

4—Pinball machine

5—Cup warmer

6—Interactive countour map