We Will Become Silhouettes

Created by Elena Corchero, we will become silhouettes is a collection of fashion accesories that explores delicate ways of incorporating organic solar cells into textiles in which technology meets tradition. The pieces are charged while used outdoors during the day. When brought indoors in the evening they transform into a decorative ambient light display for the home, powered only by energy stored earlier.
Electronic components like solar cells, resistors, and LEDs are integrated directly into the textile and wired together into working circuits using conductive thread. Organic prints and embroidery motifs recall endangered birds.

Enabling musical expression

Rachel's graphical representation of Dan's musical composition

During the H2.0 event, Adam Boulanger, researcher at the Hyperinstruments group with Professor Tod Machover presented their most impressive latest research: enabling musical expression.
Dan Ellsey, who has cerebral palsy, has been composing with the Hyperscore environment for almost two years. Adam developed a head-set and supporting software so that Dan could expressively perform his hyperscore compositions as a soloist. Dan worked closely with the team to perform his “eagle song” using head movements during the event. Rachel Roppolo worked on translating the sensor inputs from Dan into minimal graphics. Zach Watts worked on the curve algorithm to determine the type of shape Dan was making.
The performance was clearly impressive, very detailed and empowered the public.

I later talked to Adam about the project. He explained that the project necessitated a number of important steps. The team initially built on the commercial head tracker that Dan usually uses. However the commercial tracker was unsuccessful for a performance because it is not fast enough and is not reporting continuous data. Adam had to create a continuous head tracker.
Regarding the design aspects of the system, Adam had to work closely with Dan to come up with the algorithm that he needed to get clean data from Dan’s head movements, the team later calibrated the sensors for Dan.
The other step consisted in designing a controller that could run a performance. The team designed a new software that could take Dan’s range of motions and velocity of movement. They also had to do curve analysis to determine the type of shape Dan was making. Adam had to also figure out, based on his piece and movement, how this would be represented as an expression of the piece. The whole process was a discussion back and forth between Dan and the team. The system being done, they went through the piece of music and defined the type of movement needed for expression.

The performance was incredible. I cried, impressed by what the team had achieved.
The speakers were all impressive, I missed a few of them that I have to catch up on the archive. The webcast of the event is available online.


Adam, Dan and Tod

Inspiring book : the Prosthetic Impulse

The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, by Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, eds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006.

The prosthesis is not a mere extension of the human body; it is the constitution of this body qua “human.”
—Bernard Steigler,Technics and Time

With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning. . . . Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but these organs have not grown on to him, and they still give him trouble at times. . . . Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginable great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man’s likeness to God still more. But in the interests of our investigations, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character.
—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

The first chapter can be downloaded here

A living sculpture

Aimée Mullins

Today at the fantastic H2.0 event hosted by John Hockenberry and organized by the MIT Media Laboratory, key speakers presented new research initiatives for augmenting mental and physical capability and this to vastly improve the quality of human life.


Pictures from Aimee Mullins's talk

I discovered the inspiring work of Aimée Mullins, that not only is functional but also beautiful. She raises questions on identity and the body, on what it means to loose her lower self. She worked with various artists, designers and modeled for Alexander Mc Queen.


Aimée Mullins, Dazed & Confused, September 1998 by photographer Nick Knight

In Cremaster 3, actress Aimée Mullins wears blades on the soles of her shoes or a white dress and transparent crystal legs.


Cremaster 3

At the end of the H2.0 event Aimée Mullins declared: "people say i have no legs, but I have ten pairs of them and my interaction with them allow me to be a living sculpture"


Aimée' Sculptural legs, photographer: Webb Chappell


Model: Aimée Mullins, photographer: Chris Winget

video

Wearable robotic

Today at the h2.0 event -new minds, new bodies, new identities- Hugh Herr, director of the bio mechatronics group, presented his latest research. I am impressed by his work and fascinated by his own prostheses. He presented the number of persons who could benefit from wearable robotic and wearable attached to the body. From veterans who have parts of their body amputated, to anyone who could be robotically augmented. For instance, with wearable robotic, anyone could wear 100kg in a bag pack and not feel the load because it would be transmitted to the robot.

In Hugh Herr’s research, living muscle tissues are stimulated electrically to get the desired motion response. He presented the motion by mechanics in prostheses developed by the mechatronics group at the MIT media laboratory. The Rheo knee prosthesis allows to reduce the energy consumed in walking, allows to walk downstairs, upstairs, faster and slower. The person who wears the prostheses is controlling the lift. This research is based on nature, on how nature functions and steals from nature for its design.

Hugh Herr’s goal for the next years is to build the first hybrid body or limb by attaching robotic limb to the skeleton, load being transferred to the tissue. One of the main challenges is for the body to create its own seal. The group will develop the next generation of legs, and neurocontrol strategies for a direct control on these prostheses. Hugh Herr mentioned that his group developed the most powerful ankle in the world.

For the Human 2.0 event, John Maeda composed of 24 scribbled personas. I still have not chosen the one I am ...

Social affective touch for robots

My past research on psychohaptics and taptap at the Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Laboratory, involved studying the perception of touch, and how people relate affectively to haptic sensations. Today, Dr Cynthia Breazeal who leads the Robotic Life research group at the MIT Media Laboratory addressed the question of social affective touch. Her main theme is to build cooperative machines that work and learn in partnership with people.
Today at the h2.0 event -new minds, new bodies, new identities- she presented her latest research including the robotic companion. The robotic life group explores social affective touch and develops machine learning algorithms to categorize various sense of touch, from pleasant to annoying ones. Exploring the sense of touch and interpretation of touch by robots is a new area of research.
The robot is designed in the form of a bear, the bear being a universal symbol of comfort. The robot itself is covered of silicone skin to not feel like a machine when hugged. In their first experiments, the robot had local intelligence, local sensing and response, coordination. An operator could communicate with the bear to a 3d bear model on a screen.

Applications behind this work could be for family members to be able to play from everywhere, to bridge the usual generation gap between grandparents and grandchildren, to allow people to remain in contact while separated. This is especially important when a child is spending a day at the hospital alone and what it means for the parents to be able to stay with the child remotely.
Another high vision for this work is to allow collaborative partnership using a remote tutor. Cynthia mentioned that eventually the bear could be highly trained and could offer high quality education to the ones who usually are not exposed to such education.

Cool online social stuff

Bumplist

During Chi, I had a few gatherings with my old school friends from Media Lab Europe. This reminded me how fun it was to be beta tester for each other's project. Back in Dublin, I tried out Jonah and Mike's Bumplist.

BumpList only allows for a minimum amount of subscribers so that when a new person subscribes, the first person to subscribe is "bumped", or unsubscribed from the list.

Via Jonah again, I tested the super fun myfrienenemies social community. Basically, on this site, anyone can post anonymously about their enemies and connect to others through their enemies.

The Viscous Display

The Viscous Display created by Lily Shirvanee and Glorianna Davenport is a transient adaptive interface for collective play in public space.

Grounded on Henri Lefevre analysis of production of space as a social phenomenon, the viscous display proposes a space with transient meanings by exhanging social information through adaptive public interfaces.

Abstract: The Viscous Display explores the exchange of social information through transient public interfaces. Shaped by principles of ‘underground public art’, the Viscous Display is conceived as a novel mobile communication medium, where messages can be shared in public spaces. Inspired by biological learning systems; the Viscous Display learns sensorial information that form along traces of a participant’s touch and maps this information onto a flexible display.
Because it is made up of inexpensive materials, the Viscous Display is also a disposable artifact that may be collected in public spaces. It combines multi-modal sensing, learning algorithms, and a pliable silicone display.

Paper

Viscous display's web site

Couture for dogs

Kazuko Ryokai tailors clothes for tiny dogs. Her love for dogs and passion for pattern making made her create a line of clothing in Japan.

More on her web site - Keep in Touch Tokyo

Touch Sensitive Apparel at Chi 2007

Poster presented at Chi 2007

Our Touch Sensitive apparel is inspired by the vision to leverage stress, comfort, and massage people while they are on the move. When always on the move, as an interview based study has shown, people use technological devices to “tune-out” or express their fear of technology by finding “a place where [their] soul is” . What if objects that people carry with them and even carry on them could offer this sensory comfort that they seem to seek?

More on our Touch Sensitive Apparel.

Inspiration In hypermobile societies, people carry objects, information and goods. They develop habits. The notion of habitus coined by Bourdieu relates to everything that someone does, and in fact defines the individual. The search for comfort, to feel at home (to inhabit space through hab-its, habitus) when on the move defines the populations of our hyper-societies.

Design
Touch·Sensitive is a work-in-progress to develop a series of haptic modules that allow computational massage therapy to be diffused, customized and controlled by people on the move. It provides individuals with a sensory cocoon. Our current prototypes succeeded in defining a flexible structure, a mechanism of diffusion, and a feedback system for alerting and comforting the user through haptic means.
In addition, we propose to integrate machine-learning algorithms to understand the massage needs of the users through the analysis over time of the correlation between the motions of the user, the location of the pressure points, the intensity and qualities of the stimulus. We plan to develop these next steps along with specialists in massage therapy.

Download Chi 2007 WIP paper

Touch Sensitive Apparel was presented at Chi 2007. Enthusiasm, advices, references, and new ideas inspired by the visitors will lead a new prototype this summer.