Doormate

Don Willems designed a doormat. The doormat is not just for wiping your feet, but also for lowering the electricity consumption. How does it do it? The doormat is at the same time a LED display that allows people to easily turn off devices when leaving the house as well as improving their energy consumption behavior by leaning from tailored coaching when coming in. Read the full report for more information [PDF, 3M]

From his report, “The Doormate is for wiping your feet and supporting lowering of electricity consumption. It does the latter by communicating information through an integrated LED display. It allows people to easily turn of devices when leaving the house as well as improving their energy consumption behavior by learning from tailored coaching when coming in. One could say the Doormate is addressing both the ‘consumer’ – making sure no money is wasted when not at home and the ‘citizen’ – contributing by environmental friendly behaviour – in people.

LightAndThePerceptionOfCleanliness (PDF, 379KB)

17 december 2009 – Er is veel kraamvisite, veelal gewapend met camera’s, aanwezig bij de geboorte van Medsim op donderdag 10 december. Medsim is niet zomaar een baby; het is het eerste bevallingssimulatiecentrum ter wereld. De trainingsruimtes zijn gevestigd op twee verdiepingen in Kennispoort en minister Maria van der Hoeven kwam het lintje, in de vorm van een buikwand, doorknippen. De TU/e is niet alleen verhuurder van de locatie, ze levert ook de nodige techniek. [Read more:  HTML, PDF]

Serge in Cursor

The new game designed by Serge Offermans featured in Cursor. The game is the result of his final master project “Blurring the boundaries”. In his final report (PDF, 2M),

“Digital virtual worlds are important to the people living in them. They allow people to use other means to exploit their capabilities. Who they are, what they can do and what they experience in these worlds however, is hardly ever valuable outside the virtual. This project aimed to create an integration of the qualities of the virtual and the physical world, and in doing so allow benefit from one world in the other.

The result is a virtual world, designed specifically with integration of the worlds in mind. It literally draws the virtual world into the physical by bounding it to our physical reality and effectively placing virtual, invisible characters and objects in our physical world.

Interaction with the world is made possible by a device that channels audio from one world to the other and allows you to ‘feel’ and manipulate the world through movement and touch.

The specific world that has been worked out is designed for the use by children and their parents who can now benefit from the dynamic-ness of the virtual world without the closed medium of the PC.

Looking for the pet

Children and parents can now together experience the virtual world and spend time together while they are engaged in activities that also benefit the childs educational development. Because the world can only be perceived through touch and audio, the world stimulates the child’s imagination.”

Movow

“In the ‘Contextual Information Exchange’ project, the focus was on communicating the context of one user to another user. In this project I focused on creating a feeling of connectedness over distance. To create this feeling of connectedness, I did research to the missing-links between face-to-face and distant communication and concluded that virtual shadows of real physical objects or people can create a feeling of physical presence on ‘the other side’.

In this project we worked in three iterations, the last two iterations were done individually. In the second iteration I developed a concept in which the shadows of stones can form a new medium of communication over distance. The stones on one side are transfered into shadows on the other side and vice versa. This will create a decorative piece of stones and shadows, that is made with use of two persons that live on a distance from each other.

The final concept is the ‘Movow’, which stands for ‘Moving Shadow’. In this concept the amount of people and the speed with which these people move are detected in one room, and transfered into shadows of the ‘Movow’ light object in another room. The ‘Movow’ is able to generate shadows according to the amount of people and movement. When there are not that much people in the other room, only the lower ring of the prototype will be lit. When the amount of people increases, the light will ‘grow’ to the ceiling. The speed with which the lights will be circulate in the rings, depends on the movement of the people in the other room. For this concept a prototype is build that represents the light and shadow capabilities of the concept.”

“Casper” is among the others, one of the two finalists, from the department of Industrial Design, TU/e. “The Caspr concepts explore hospitable behavior of digital products – for example a speaker system which shows curiosity and enthusiasm towards the guests’ music phone. Hereby the hosts open the door of their digital home and the guests can be surprised and actively stimulated to participate and share.”

This project is conducted at the Designed Intelligence Group of the Department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology, in collaboration with Microsoft Research in Cambridge (UK). See more on http://www.alice.id.tue.nl.