• Tunable Thermal Behavior
• Edible
• Conducts Electricity
• Acoustically Transparent
• Refraction index of water

Hydrogel is 97% water. The process of making Hydrogel included boiling water and then adding a gelling agent that was then put into different shapes and sized containers. The gel would solidify over time (about 5 – 10 minutes) and then you could pick it up from these moulds. We used petridishes, test tubes and ice cube trays. Below are a few pictures of the process.

The Edible Ice Cubes – When these food colored ice-cubes of gel are added to water, the coloring starts to naturally change the color of the drink. We thought about interactions here that could include noticing if someone tampered with your drink or not and notifying the drinker about this.

Based on these initial explorations, we decided to focus our prototypes on the following:

•  Edible Interaction
• Augmented Perception
• Material Logic

The three prototypes/interactions we came up with include:

• Yum! Gelecriticity – an interaction allowing children to create a relationship with food that can interact with them about these applications.
• Open Gela-me – Being able to interact with someone over a meal or conversation through this panel that also seems like a mosiac piece of art.
• I/O Gel – Being able to use the gel to be able to ‘save’ specific properties of foods and being able to experience a variety of tastes and flavors in a gel form. Could this be the future of food?

All videos for these interactions can be found in our presentation here.

WinWon is a winter jacket that solves all problems we may have during the freezing cold/rain weather of Boston and actually makes it reasonably convenient and (dare I say) slightly enjoyable too.

The jacket will include the following features:

• Material that will be light-weight, but will expand if temperatures drop below a certain level (30 degrees F)
  • This feature can be created using Pneuduino
• Material will be able to extrude heat towards body based on a press of a button and stop based on a button too
• Phones can be connected to the jacket via bluetooth allowing you to be able to leave your phone in your jacket, but still view and navigate through your jacket. Your jacket can be wet and it still wouldn’t matter. The screen would show up/project on your sleeve of the jacket
• The hoodie of this jacket would extend out into an umbrella and you would be able to navigate and function through how much further or not this umbrella could go, giving you complete control of your jacket

Sensing

• Most of the above “accessories” or “interactions” are common in other objects, but WinWon brings all this together. The unique point for WinWon however, is its sensing capabilities
• The Jacket is able to sense how you are feeling through your heart rate, body temperature and how quick/slow your actions are at this point. Are you walking very fast? Running late to something? Is your heart rate too high? Are you angry?
• Based on how you are feeling, the jacket is able to provide advice, counseling, suggestions, tips for what to do to calm down. Or just how to deal with a certain situation. Think Iron Man suit without all the heavy metal machinery.

The “vision” or capabilities of the above

But what if we could translate that into a material?

And make it into something that was part of an “everyday” use (at least in Boston winters!)

Udayan’s comment: The body heat regulation through inflation is most interesting to me. Can you also think about interactions around this?

This jacket and inflatable helmet might also be interesting to you.