Inspiration

The COVID-19 lockdown has had unseen societal consequences: it got the New Yorker to say "I miss people". To honor this admission of humanity, we decided to build some Love.

But how do you build a feeling?

After heated Zooms, we defined the one thing that embodies all that we lost during this past lonely trimester. Above all, we lost touch.

We lost touch with our relatives and our friends. We lost touch with reality that seemed to be straight out of a bad Netflix sci-fi film. We literally lost the sense of touch, trapped in a digital bubble in our tiny "cozy" NYC cages.

Creation

That is why we created... a robotic arm that extends the hand of friendship to the passerby.

This paper-made prosthetics mimics the user who approaches a hand towards the webcam. Doing so, it aims at providing a feeling of companionship, of understanding, and maybe - if the only person you've talked to for the past 3 months is the reflection of yourself on the back of that same spoon you've been using for every meal to eat lentils out of the can (fictional example, definitely not inspired by the author's "new normal") - of love.

Toolbox

• Servo motors and driver (ServoBlaster)
• Raspberry Pi 4
• origamis (Folding Techniques for Designers by Paul Jackson)
• fishing knots
• MQTT (shiftr.io)
• real-time hand detection in the browser (handtrack.js)