Haptics
Day Two: Prototyping Time!!!
After working on our Heartbeat sketch to figure out the motor driver, we debated a couple slightly more complex ideas than just adding a distance sensor to our sketch from the previous days.
One idea was to create an invisible maze that would be detected through vibrational notifications of your crossing a boundary.
This seemed a little hard.
But the principle of a Time of Flight sensor being used to detect position remained and our final idea became
Butterflies in the Tummy
The principle idea isn’t too crazy. The user would have a wearable band, decorated with butterflies, containing our array of 6 vibrating motors inside. The motors would flutter gently and randomly. As the user approaches the sensor or their crush (or other point of anxiety), the frequency and strength of the vibrations would increase.
One choice made pretty early on was that the vibrations would not all be happening at the same time, simply for issues of power and time in creating a transistor based circuit or mobile external power source. But the fluttering effect is achieved quite well, and as the buzzes become more frequent, the space between them becomes harder for the stomach to detect, so this decision ultimately did not affect our interaction.
Another choice was the wearable aspect. We were, as things often are in prototyping sessions, beholden to the time we had and instead opted for a fun scrappy version that would still display that these are in fact butterflies.
The tissue paper that Martha brought was perfect for this and even provided a very noticeable audio feedback as well as some visual fluttery feedback.
Our last issue was the need to keep our ToF sensor stationary.
Nice.
And thusly our butterflies in the tummy project! Is born :).
janky, scrappy, a mess, however you want to call it. I’m proud of us for quickly learning to properly solder and insulate these motors so quickly and for so speedily adapting our too-short-to-reach wires into these longer thin blue connections for our circuit.
Here is Leia demo’ing our prototype.
