What if we could say something else through the Face? InterFACE is a interactive Mask that respond to real time data. Is a prototype fabricated with the logics, technique and materials of soft Robotics. The dynamic start controlling the variables of data that the user wants to show though the mask. Money, health, temperature, country, IQ, culture, etc. after this informations is assigned you can decided when to actived through a touch pad with capacitive sensor and in real time visualize in processing, so everybody can know what this interactions mean. After you activated the mask, at the same time this will send information that is controlled by a Arduino Leonardo that will trigger a servo valve and a air pomp in the position that you choose in the map of the capacitive sensor allowing to inflate the mask.
The idea started trying to copy the interaction of tinder, but instead of making a match based in the information of the physical aspect that you can deduct by a photo, you can wear a mask and when someone else is wearing the mask too and has the same values of the variables, you can make a match through inflating, changing color, etc. in an interactive way.
The Mask was designed to integrate a serial of layers, three of them trigger by an air pomp, water pomp and a nicrome wire. the layer of Air to inflte the different parts of the mask, nicrone to change the color by heating the properties of the material that was combined with thermocromatic additive, and the cool water to reverse the changing color.
Conclusions. I was too excited to play with the soft robotics, but in my case it is not as hard as i thought, I will keep experimenting with more complex forms for future prototyping. Electronics was my weakness because it was the first time I design them that is why I could not finished because i took me more time that I expected. Even though my prototype is in a basic stage, I learnt a lot and now I'm more interesting to explore more the fabrications of wearables tech.
What is Next? For the time I could not integrate all the layers in one Mask, I had a lot of problems with the implementation of the nicrome wire inside the ecoflex, I could not make it wireless, and i could not explore the interaction with the water pomp, and the most important I could not make the system integration of all the parts, I will keep working on this in the next weeks from my Lab, so maybe I can have everything ready for the Fab 13 in Chile.
Thank you very much to Santi, Xavi, Arnau, Esteban and Citlali for all the help in Fab Lab Barcelona! You guys are amazing!
Fab Academy 2017 | Fab Lab Barcelona | Trinidad A. Gomez Machuca |
IAAC | trinidad.gomez@iaac.net | |