The Faux Shaux

We’ve come a long way this week, but let me explain from where we were a few days ago.

The idea was to create a way that a person can comfort another, in a way that audio and video don’t achieve.  Ideally, it would take a 3-dimensional impression of your hand (or whatever you put on it, the cat?), process the values that would then be sent to your chat buddy’s computer, then rendered to their 3d surface.  This means a soldier can understand the size of his newborn’s foot and people can literally hold hands across the world.

When Juri, Diana and I met Tuesday, we were still discussing an approach to making a prototype for a system that is implausibly expensive to create.  For user’s interaction to heed real-time results, we would have to control the many nodes of the output device discreetly, and to do so, means buying a dedicated actuator for each node.

Naturally, we chose the frugal path, designing a mechanism to move the actuator across a grid of nodes, stopping at each node, altering the position (z axis) of said node, and moving on to update the grid.

The problem with this approach is that there is a disconnect between the user’s real-time input and results that would take a long time to render (essentially, the finer the result, the longer the wait).  What is the point in making an interactive system, when the user is constantly waiting for the output to catch up to his movements from minutes ago?

Ok, so let’s use a small number of output nodes.  But how do we make an attractive result with few nodes?

So, let’s call a few input nodes a finger.  And instead of reading pins, we’ll read the light reflected from a finger through a webcam.  The computer interface will render video to the user’s actions in front of the webcam.  When the user likes a pattern, he or she may click the mouse, to take a snapshot that will print to the output device.

The way we decided to actuate these pins, is touching a matching grid of electromagnets to the backs of the pins, which we glued some sheet metal to.  The entire grid of magnets is moved toward the pin board via servo operation (this is that lego device you see in the video).  Each time the servo rotates, pin positions are checked, and if the servo & pin position correlate, power to the magnet is shut off by opening the circuit.

Check out this great sketch Juri made.

For brevity, check some features that we’ve tackled so far: