AirCode: Unobtrusive Physical Tags for Digital Fabrication

Abstract

We present AirCode, a technique that allows the user to tag physically fabricated objects with given information. An AirCode tag consists of a group of carefully designed air pockets placed beneath the object surface. These air pockets are easily produced during the fabrication process of the object, without any additional material or postprocessing. Meanwhile, the air pockets affect only the scattering light transport under the surface, and thus are hard to notice to our naked eyes. But, by using a computational imaging method, the tags become detectable. We present a tool that automates the design of air pockets for the user to encode information. AirCode system also allows the user to retrieve the information from captured images via a robust decoding algorithm. We demonstrate our tagging technique with applications for metadata embedding, robotic grasping, as well as conveying object affordances.

ACM UIST 2017 Technical Papers

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• 3D Printing Magnetophoretic Displays
• AniCode: Authoring Coded Artifacts for Network-Free Personalized Animations
• AnisoTag: 3D Printed Tag on 2D Surface via Reflection Anisotropy
• InfoPrint: Embedding Information into 3D Printed Objects
• Claycode: Stylable and Deformable 2D Scannable Codes
• A Preliminary Study for Identification of Additive Manufactured Objects with Transmitted Images
• Interacting with Acoustic Simulation and Fabrication