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Make it vibrate

A project log for Cherishables

Digital collectables made tangible. Bringing life to blockchain based creatures.

andrewnAndrewN 06/28/2018 at 18:500 Comments

Things are going well for Cherishables, we continue to make progress on the device. One of the key questions for us is how the device will actuate and behave. Our earlier experiments pointed us in the direction of vibration as a form of output/display. Vibrating motors are readily available for consumer devices, there is a robust market for these little guys. They are used in everything from smartphones to gaming controllers to cheap toys.

The main question we face is how exactly will these motors express behaviors, or qualities, in the final device? If each "soul" that is stored in the device is unique and distinguishable from others, how do we create a system that will accommodate this? It must be compelling to the user, something beyond simple buzzes and beeps.

Our task is to design the behavior of the device, using vibration as material.

For this we will need custom tools. Unfortunately, there is no Adobe Vibrator designer to easily mock up and design vibrations, we have to invent this.

The first vibrating rig has 5 motors attached to an Arduino Micro. We can begin to experiment with modulation the vibration patterns as well as the sequence the motors are turned on and off.  There are many possibilities here. The motors have connected with long wires so we can stick them into various cavities and materials. How the vibration emirates through the chosen form factor and material composition will also have an effect on the final feel of the device.

The differences between using a 3D printed shell and a squishy ball sandwich were very interesting. 

The 3D printed shell allowed vibration to "leak" over the entire surface of the form, but if a finger was placed directly on top of a motor, it was evident that there was a motor there. So there seems to be some falloff of vibration moving away from each motor. Adding more motors only diluted the vibration, making the individual motors harder to feel.

The squishy material tended to absorb the vibration a bit more. It was difficult to detect the presence of each motor individually. Vibration was essentially smoothed over the entire squishy form. Squeezing gave the feeling of turning up the vibration volume, as the amount of material between the motors and fingers was effectively decreased.

Again, we are in search of different qualities of vibration. We want skin level effects, and deeper vibrations that seem to bubble up from the deep. 

Here we decided to stick some motors in a foam ball. The ideas was to have the motors pulse in sequence, making a kind of spinning, or orbiting, feel to the vibration sequence. This failed completely. There are just too few motors, and depending on how you held the ball, some motors had more presence than others. You could not feel all the motors equally. We stuck with it, though, and after a few adjustments, we were able to get the motors to effectively pulse in what felt like a heartbeat. This would be the deep, user the surface, effect we were looking for. A combination of foam and the alternating pulses allows this to happen. It merits further exploration.

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