Motion Control
Situation
When Nintendo released Labo I was fascinated by how motion sensors & cardboard can act as digital input. But I also thought one step further: what if you could make anything interactive just by having a motion sensor attached to your hand?
Task
So for my Physical Computing course at UCL I wanted to create a wearable device that uses the motion sensor to detect interactions with cardboard controls.
Initial idea sketched on iPhone using the Paper app
Action
When I got the initial idea I immediately started sketching it on my phone using the Paper app.
I explored multiple technical solutions by building different prototypes using Arduino. For the enclosure I used Autodesk Fusion 360 to create a 3D model that was used for 3D printing. A laser cut model of a radio was built to demonstrate the interaction with a low-fidelity prototype.
I used Sketch and InVision to create an early prototype of the app that translates the motion data from the wearable into a digital control. The final iOS app used CoreBluetooth to communicate with the wearable.
First prototype consisting of an Arduino 101 and an NFC reader
Cardboard prototype to test interaction
Laser-cut radio to demo interaction with a low-fidelity prototype
Interactive prototypes created in Sketch & InVision
Result
Motion Control is a wearable device that turns anything into a digital control.
Only NFC tags are required to identify a physical control as digital input. The hand movement is captured by the wearable device and translated into digital input by a Bluetooth connected app.
This allows users to easily add interactivity to low fidelity prototypes and is a simple way of adding physical controls to smart home setups.
Video describing the result
