Final project ideas

Our first task was to think of our last task in the course. Symbolic.

I brainstormed around different directions ranging from useful to fun. Below, I will present a few of these directions.

Adaptive wearable devices

I am very passionate about personalized digital health. I was thinking what project I can do in the scope of this course. I had this idea for a while for belt, that will have on-device machine learning scheme that is constantly learning. The input can be plug-and-play sensors, as well as external factors. And the real question for me is how to interact with the user to get real-time guidance of the learning process. I was thinking if I can make a mini-version of this idea as part of the course, but couldn’t think of anything I would be happy with. But still keeping this in the back of my mind, as I would definitely need some of the tools granted in this course to build such an appartus.

Cycling gear

The first thing I bought when I arrived in Cambridge was a bicycle. Well, to be honest, the first thing was an Uber, the second was dinner, and the third was bicycle, but you get the point.

I used to cycle a lot in my hometown, Tel-Aviv, and I hope to continue this tradition in Cambridge. I was thinking of what kind of utility I can build to boost my cycling experience. The “best” idea I had, is to actually build some kind of bridge that will allow me to walk while the bicycles are riding next to me. When I cycle, often I have to receive or reply to some text message on the phone. I would like to be able to get off the bike, and write some reply - while still walking towards my destination. This is especially useful for long phone calls. Yes, it’s not going to save the world, but I think it’s useful. Can also make it nice with some funky LEDs.

Interaction glove

Midburn is Israel’s Regional Burn (inspired by Burning Man), where I have been an active member since 2014. I have also participated in the Borderlands, the Scandinavian Regional Burn in Denmark. Burn events have a lot of interactive art installment, of many kinds, and I had a long dream to make an interactive tech art piece myself.

I love installments that allow its “viewers” to have an active experience, especially between the group. When the art piece gives the “player” a sandbox to play in, s/he can create things that the original creator didn’t imagine. That’s the kind of thing I would like to create.

Specifically, I was thinking about gloves. Each glove is equipped with conducting material at the finger tips, or better a pressure sensitive pad. The tips are connected to a device on the wrist, which has a color display, probably a matrix of LEDs. A group of people, let’s call them players, wear gloves, each starts off with some different color. By interacting with each other - touching the finger tips together - color starts to flow from glove to glove. However, the pattern/speed/intensity of the flow is modulated by the interaction - how strong it is, the rhythm, etc… and the players find it all by themselves, hopefully creating cool patterns and unique ways to interact. Some gloves can also be put on physical objects in the space, or on other parts of the body, like the face. For extra credit, it could be cool if the LED matrix is constantly modulated by some bio-signal, e.g. heart rate - letting two people sync their heart rate into a symphony of colors. That’s the general idea.

Playing around with CAD

As part of our task, we had to draft out one of our ideas in various tools, ranging from raster, vector imaging to CAD and animation.

I tried to sketch rough drafts of the interaction glove, but my focus was mostly around learning to use these new tools.

Raster (GIMP)

I tried to make up for my limited drawing abilities with Bezier curves.

Didn’t help much.

Vector (Inkscape)

Here I focused on the wrist piece of the glove. Mostly I learned how to clone objects and align them properly.

CAD (FreeCAD)

Again, I tried to sketch out the wrist part, while focusing on learning techniques like getting from 2D to 3D, and set operations between objects, and parameterization.

The holes’ radius, the gap between them, as well as the strap gaps are all parameterized.

It is important to notice that I’m quite sure the LED matrix won’t need any holes, but I just wanted to mess around with some kind of set operation and parameterization.

The original CAD design (in FreeCAD format) is available here.