Shape Display Shader Language (SDSL): a new programming model for shape changing displays

Shape-changing displays' dynamic physical affordances have inspired a range of novel hardware designs to support new types of interaction. Despite rapid technological progress, the community lacks a common programming model for developing applications for these visually and physically-dynamic display surfaces. This results in complex, hardware-specific, custom-code that requires significant development effort and prevents researchers from easily building on and sharing their applications across hardware platforms. As a first attempt to address these issues we introduce SDSL, a Shape-Display Shader Language for easily programming shape-changing displays in a hardware-independent manner. We introduce the (graphics-derived) pipeline model of SDSL, an open-source implementation that includes a compiler, runtime, IDE, debugger, and simulator, and show demonstrator applications running on two shape-changing hardware setups.