A tactile luminous floor for an interactive autonomous space

A Tactile Luminous Floor Used as a Playful Space’s Skin*

This paper describes the hardware and software engineering of the novel tactile luminous floor and how the floor is used as the skin of the playful interactive space Ada, which ran as a public exhibit for five months in 2002 and had 550,000 visitors. Ada’s floor consisted of 360 hexagonal 66-cm tiles covering a total area of 136 m, each with tactile load sensors and dimmable neon red, green, an...

Using a luminous-tactile floor and auditory signal processing to make an automatic disco

Interactive Experiences in Public Spaces: A Novel Floor Display System Based on Luminous Modular Units

We describe the design of an interactive concrete floor display for public spaces and discuss its implementation and areas of application. The primary purpose of our system is to provide new forms of collaborative interaction in long-term installations in both indoor and outdoor spaces. Our design is an expandable system of interconnected tiles, which control an array of RGB Light-Emitting Diod...

Getting to Know Your Neighbors: Unsupervised Learning of Topography from Real-World, Event-Based Input

Biological neural systems must grow their own connections and maintain topological relations between elements that are related to the sensory input surface. Artificial systems have traditionally prewired such maps, but the sensor arrangement is not always known and can be expensive to specify before run time. Here we present a method for learning and updating topographic maps in systems compris...

Interactive Audio-Tactile Annotation of 3D Point Clouds for Robotic Manipulation

A major limitation of 3D point cloud-based representations is that they often fail to capture an object’s functional features – a 3D model of a stapler does not specify where the stapler should be pressed. For many tools, successful manipulation requires that the robot detects the specific location that needs to be actuated (e.g., a trigger or a button) to turn on the tool. Yet, to date, virtua...