News

Meet TOFU, A Squash and Stretch Robot

TOFU is a project to explore new ways of robotic social expression by leveraging techniques that have been used in 2-D animation for decades. Disney Animation Studios pioneered animation tools such as "squash and stretch" and "secondary motion" in the 50s. Such techniques have since been used widely by animators, but are not commonly used to design robots. TOFU, who is named after the squashing and stretching food product, can also squash and stretch. Clever use of compliant materials and elastic coupling, provide an actuation method that is vibrant yet robust. Instead of using eyes actuated by motors, TOFU uses inexpensive OLED displays, which offer highly dynamic and lifelike motion. TOFU is the project of Ryan Wistort, a master's student in the Personal Robots group.
Research Group/Program: 
Personal Robots

Mycrocosm

Sharing everyday data
The rise in popularity of the Weblog, and the development of its many variants such as photoblogs, vlogs, moblogs, and tumblelogs, demonstrate that people are increasingly willing to share what they are doing, seeing, and thinking. Micro-blogging has opened this space up even further to those who would not at all consider themselves authors; services like twitter and the status updates common to social networking sites open up a form of publication that is well suited to this wide and fundamentally amateur audience. Mycrocosm is a Web service that uses the visual language of statistics to share even smaller chunks of personal information—individual numbers and words that are full of meaning in our lives—and allows users to track a wide variety of the minutiae of their daily lives to build up a rich online picture of the tiny things they find meaningful.
mycrocosm data
Project: 
Mycrocosm
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Quickies

Intelligent sticky notes
‘Quickies’ brings one of the most useful inventions of the twentieth century—the ubiquitous sticky note—into the digital age. Sticky (aka Post-it) notes help us manage our to-do lists and capture short reminders and information needed in the near future, but keeping track of them can be a task in and of itself. Quickies enrich Post-it notes, making them trackable and manageable; we give these stickies intelligence and the ability to remind us at the relevant time about the task we ought to perform. RFID and ink-recognition technologies can make it possible to create intelligent sticky notes that are searchable, send reminders and messages, and, more broadly, help us to connect seamlessly our physical and informational experiences.
quickies
Person/Organization: 
Pattie Maes
Research Group/Program: 
Fluid Interfaces
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