Computing with Clay:

I am interested in ways to interface a material like clay as a computational tool for modelling and navigating 3D virtual spaces. I am also thinking about tangible interfaces in relation to Augmented reality and using a haptic mapping to contribute to an augmentation. I am thinking of this as an augmentation process as well as an interface. Methods to compute the volume of the clay include potentially the following: maybe magnetic fields/magnets, capacitive/proximity sensing, computer vision or depth imaging using infrared.

Learning science in school is not always a fun activity, until something is physical and tangible. Often many of the physics and physical quantities are just numbers. How can these physical quantities and numbers become tangible. The goal of this project is to teach physical quantities such as force, velocity and momentum taking advantage of the tangibility of the shape display. The idea would be to use the pins on the shape display to emulate these quantities and help one understand and associate these quantities with sense of touch and feel.

We are all busy. We are definitely doing something wrong.

We have more things to do today than we could do in a whole week. We seem to be in a quest to be connected better, but we forget we should be spending time outside the screen.

Machines are, supposely, getting more and more intelligent to do things we used to do before, but why do we seem to be spending the same amount of hours in front of a computer.

Aside from what computers do for us, there are creative tasks we need to do on our own. What if we could work using analog interfaces, so we don’t have to spend as much time as we spend now looking at a screen.

Around this concept, I would like to share a few ideas that would, in some way or another, contribute towards giving us more screen-free time.

• Link physical objects to CAD elements or parameters.
• A paper grid that establish a cartesian three dimensional space where you can place geometries that serve as input in a digital model.
• Dots that represent a polyline and get also represented in CAD.
• An outline or wireframe that gets interpreted as a structure and gets animated as it would react to gravity. (You draw a simple structure and a projection or a simulation of its deflection is shown.).
• Physical balls that you can actually move around the table.

Idea

Like 3D printing technology, Radical Atom system allows designer to create physical objects beyond the limitation of craft methods, but one step further, it allows designer to create and adjust the design in a intuitive tangible fashion in real time. In architectural design or urban planning realm, design is always scale sensitive. With Radical Design Tool, designers could not only exam their design in different scale effortlessly, but also exam it through out the entire time line / life circle.

Implementation

The InForm shape display table provide a perfect way to bring designer’s 3D geometry into physical world. An Argumented Reality system will be necessary to fill the gap of InForm’s low-resolution and bring all the design related information alive to the user.

Related Research

CityScope project of Changing Places group, Media Lab has done researches on city data, city simulations and visualization for 2 years. It will be a great resource for data, demands and design strategies. Also, the Radical Design Tool will benefit the CityScope project in terms of building a more dynamic, scaleless design platform.

We often use an n-dimensional space in computer algorithms to represent a database of information and also we use this same space to find a specific piece of information within that database. We could use the Tangible Interface Group’s Shape Display to both specify a location within a n-dimensional space and display nearby items to that location.

Search in N-Dimensions (Background)

Consider the simpler case of a 1-dimensional space. Say that I lay out on the floor of my room all of my music CDs. On the left side of the room I place my least favorite CDs, on the right side of the room I place my most favorite CDs, and I place CDs anywhere in between the left and right according to how much I like or dislike them. If I want to find my favorite CDs I just have to walk closer to the right side of the room and pick a CD up.

Usually when deciding what CD to listen to, how much I like the CD, is not a sufficient criteria to choose a CD. Lets say we also want to differentiate music based on how recently the album was released. Continuing to use my floor as a database lets place newer CDs (2015) near the top of the floor and older CDs near the bottom. We have now mapped my CDs onto a 2-dimensional space. Recent CD that I like would be near the top-right hand corner of my room. Old CD that I like would near the bottom-right hand corner of my room, and every other combination of these 2 features would be mapped to my floor.

We could categorize our music according to a 3rd feature (say number of band members) and map that to height of the CD. So CDs with more band members could be propped up on stools, or suspended from the ceiling on strings. But as we add more and more features we wish to categorize our music by it becomes difficult to map these to real world dimensions. This is where using a concept like an n-dimensional becomes useful.

In software we could create a database of all of my CDs. I could categorize each CD according to numerous attributes including likability, release date, number of band numbers, repetitiveness, dance-ability, BPM, etc… We could even place this in a spreadsheet, but how do I use this database to actually find a CD. If we have a spreadsheet I could sort by a column, perhaps repetitiveness, bringing all my trance music to the top. We could also filter by category, say we only wanted danceable music released after 2011. But, another way to consider finding a CD is to consider my database as an n-dimensional space (see feature vectors, feature spaces).

When I placed CDs on the floor of my room every CD had a fixed location in space according to values I gave its attributes: like-ability & release date. Similarly if each CD has say 25 attributes we can consider each CD as a having a fixed location in a 25-dimensional space! Now, say I am in the mood for CDs that are highly repetitive, were released around 1983 and have a lot of industrial noises, I can use those properties to specify a location in my n-dimensional space and then look to see what CDs are near me (see k-nearest neighbors search and euclidean distance in n-dimensions).

Search with Shape Display (Project Idea)

We could use the Tangible Interface Group’s Shape Display to find music within our CD collection. We could use the left shape display to specify a location in n-dimensional space (well, where n is limited to the maximum number of pins). If we use the height of each pin to represent a number between 0 and 1 then by pushing in a particular pin we set the value for that dimension (attribute) thus fully specifying a fixed location in n-dimensional space. As we change our location, the middle shape display would adjust his pins to show the nearest CD, additionally AR could be used to project the album cover onto the shape display, and the album could start playing immediately.

It would probably not be a great experience to only show a single CD. Instead of using the entire 2D grid to display a single CD we could just show the 10 most important (or however many columns the shape display has) of each CD. Thus we could show the 10 nearest CDs, one per CD per row of the shape display. We could play all 10 CDs simultaneously and then make a CD louder if the user clicks on his row.

Using sensors and actuators that mimic natural movements, Computational BioForm could work as miniature exoskeletons to be placed on existing materials, bringing them to life through bio-inspired movements.

The exoskeletons would behave somewhat autonomously, but with care and human input, their motions would mimic their theoretical ‘health’, and could serve as an illustrative tool for environmental changes, and could also exist as a tool for children to see magnified effects organic changes.

Potential applications
-A monitor that can move as it displays content.
-A map visualizer in 3D.
-A keyboard that provides haptic feedback for mobile devices.
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Implementation thoughts
Perhaps the technology from Unimorph can be used to build a radical surface. By dividing a unimorph surface into a mesh, the shape of the entire surface could be controlled by actuating specific segments of the mesh.

It is my personal experience with babies are a bit frustrating because they are not able to express their feelings or needs. Every time I spend time with my nephews or nieces, in general babies, I do not know what they want or how they feel exactly, and most of time spending time to figure out what they want. However, most of  first time parents have similar experiences as well . From this experience, I had a concept that clothes, socks or bracelets which can detect babies’ emotion/ temperature/motions or position and analyze them and show the info as tangible way. In this way, parents or people like me can see the info and get sense of what they need or how they feel. It can detect emotions by establishing sensors that can detect heartbeats or body temperature, and change colors or texture of  clothes with auditory applications.

It also can be very useful for children who need to be disciplined at home or in class. A lot of researches show that children get hurt emotionally or humiliated while being scolded but do not express it. This can effect to form their relationship with parents and personality.

Picking up vibrations on the trees, shrubs and side-walk to pneumatically actuate a barrier in the middle of the road in high traffic times.

The barrier could also be for preventing accidents across roads for long distance driving. but maintaining clear wide roads when the barrier is not required.

By Kritika Dhanda