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Digital Clay |
As mentioned in the Leverage section, a new five-year NSF grant was received in Fall 2001 to pursue new types of human-computer interaction devices. This grant was funded through the Information Technology Research (ITR) Initiative within NSF, a very competitive program. A collaboration of seven Georgia Tech faculty from Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, College of Computing, and the Center for Rehabilitation Technology resulted in a major grant to develop new types of human-computer interaction devices. We call these devices “digital clay,” evoking the image of interacting with a lump of physical clay to shape it … and having the clay integrated with a computer, so that shape changes can be captured electronically, represented in CAD, communicated to others, etc. The figure on this page shows one clay configuration with stacking hexagonal prisms built on top of a MEMS-fabricated backplane. The design, analysis, fabrication, and usage of digital clay are all multidisciplinary activities. Austina Nguyen, supervised by David Rosen, is working on the design and fabrication of SL scaffolds (the clay’s structure). Her background in Industrial Design will provide an important usability perspective to the work. Paul Bosscher is working on the kinematics of the clay’s interior structure, supervised by Imme Ebert-Uphoff. Haihong Zhu has a strong background working with parallel robots and their controls. He will apply this background, supervised by Wayne Book. Ari Glezer is another PI who will be supervising work in the micro-scale fluidics that are important for controlling the clay. All of these people are in Mechanical Engineering. In Electrical and Computer Engineering, Professor Mark Allen is applying a MEMS fabrication technology for producing polymer laminates to the clay’s backplane. In the College of Computing, Professor Jarek Rossignac is exploring applications for digital clay and simulating the behavior of various clay designs. In the Center of Rehabilitation Technologies, John Goldthwaite is an expert on assistive devices for blind people, an application area for digital clay. This is an exciting project that will be pushing the envelope of technology, as well as human-computer usability. To achieve high resolution displays, it is important to construct small “cells” with which to compose the clay’s structure. We will push our new Viper SL machine to construct such small cells. We will also push SL resin suppliers to develop materials with improved material properties, such as flexibility and fatigue strength to serve this application area. Look for updates on this project. |
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