Photovoltaic Materials for the Design of Self-Powered Interfaces and Interactions using Shadow Detection

Copyright held by the owner/author(s). CHI’20,, April 25–30, 2020, Honolulu, HI, USA ACM 978-1-4503-6819-3/20/04. https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.XXXXXXX Abstract In this paper, we review and describe how different photovoltaic (PV) materials can be used for designing selfpowered interfaces and interactions using indoor ambient light to both power the device and to detect simple shadowbased gestures. We consider seven points when comparing the material technologies: device efficiency, device stability, device manufacturability, device flexibility, photovoltaic cell optical transparency, material toxicity and finished product aesthetics. We provide a step-by-step PV fabrication process for the HCI community. This will help HCI researchers to consider the opportunities and challenges when designing PV-based self-powered IoT applications with an HCI context.