Disco lamp: An interactive robot lamp

Abstract

When watching a Pixar movie, we are always amused by the cute and sprightly lamp hopping up and down to replace the letter "I" of the word "PIXAR" before the movie starts. A simple movement, but a touching one. Here, motivated by wondering what other functionality a lamp can have, we report on the design and development of an interactive robotic lamp. It can sense hand gestures, thus either providing appropriate lighting to the area where the hand resides, or changing its mode between lighting and music. The movable and reactive lighting permits the operator to work freely in front of a bench with a large area which needs intensive lighting. When the lamp is in music mode, it becomes a robot dancer which follows the rhythm of the music and provides disco-style dynamic lighting.978-1-4799-5283-0/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE

Soft Speakers: Digital Embroidering of DIY Customizable Fabric Actuators

“…Researchers have explored the potential of interactive furniture and soft furnishing at home, with examples ranging from hard objects such as tables [9], chairs [42] and lamps [21] to soft furnishing such as upholstered chairs [28], sofas [22], carpets [46], table-cloths [23,49] and curtains [48]. Instead of introducing new gadgets and devices to our living spaces, such interactive designs augmented pre-existing home objects with sensing and/or actuation within the fabric of our surrounding environment itself.…”

“…Such prior work on interactive furniture focused on exploring user experience in interacting and/or living with such everyday things as computational objects. Findings showed how embedding interactivity within everyday artifacts can support social engagement [21,23,48], self-reflection [9,22,46] and self-expression [49]. The interactivity embedded included soft sensing [23] and feedback in the form of display of information [42,48] or actuation (such as motion, colour-change [22,46], pattern-change [9] and shape-change [23]).…”

Working with an Autonomous Interface

“…DeVito et al [9] created an actuated desk lamp and used a user-centred approach to design hand gestures for different control tasks, such as switching the light on or off and shining at a certain object. A more playful prototype is disco lamp [21], which tracks a hand to provide light at that area and also dances to music. The most sophisticated robotic lamp was presented by Hoffman [14].…”