This paper presents FiberDrops, a tubular system that generates droplet-based gradients by controlling the flow of colored liquids within transparent liquid. While previous studies have explored visual expression using droplets, FiberDrops introduces two distinctive features. First, it employs electrohydrodynamic (EHD) pumps, providing a lightweight and silent alternative to conventional mechanical pumps. Second, by incorporating a custom connector based on microfluidic techniques, it generates fine droplets from parallel flows of transparent and colored liquids and enables precise density control. Compared with conventional on–off control of the pumps between colored and transparent liquids, this approach achieves finer droplet spacing, while allowing flexible variation of flow rate even for the same patterns. These capabilities enable visual effects such as continuous color transitions and dynamic motifs, expanding the expressiveness of fluid interfaces. This paper details the system’s design, fabrication, and control methods and demonstrates representative design examples.
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems