Demo of a page in a puppy-themed interactive fabric book
We used the Multi-Touch Kit Software Toolkit and attached it to the back of the left ear of the puppy. The only other digital intput is a fabric button hidden underneath the puppy’s belly.
For outputs, we combined visual, audio, and haptic feedbacks using LEDs, the laptop speaker, and vibration motors.
To minimize the expected feeling of having some changes after doing something, we implmented a realatively naive state machine so that the puppy could be in different moods.
Due to time constraint, we used conductive copper tape instead of conductive yarn to fabricate the sensor grid. Between the aesthetics and the normality of interactions, we chose aesthetics to hide the sensor grid. If we fabricated the sensor grid using conductive yarn, we could interact with the top of the furry ears with gestures that are more similar to how one would pet a puppy.
Due to material constraint, we weren’t able to integrate as many different textures as we would like. Adding more textures to the body of the puppy allows a mroe diverse tactile experience.
This is only a prototype of a single page, we invisioned a puppy-themed interactive book of which the interactive puppy is like a bookmark. Every page is a different setting, and placing the puppy on the page triggers the start of the interaction to tell stories about puppy’s different behaviors and reactions in different settings.