190 research outputs found

    Inflashoe:A Shape Changing Shoe to Control Underfoot Pressure

    Get PDF
    We present Inflashoe, an interactive shoe that uses a pneumatic system to change the inflation level within the sole. This allows the shoe to adapt its shape to different surfaces and users' foot morphology, or to alter users' gait. Inflashoe can not only change the overall inflation, but can also individually control the inflation of the back and front of the insole, creating different levels of elevation across the shoe when needed. In this paper we describe our prototype implementation and present the results of a preliminary evaluation study. We show that 85% of participants found Inflashoe to be equal to or more comfortable than their ordinary shoes, and that nearly 60% of them would prefer comfort to style. In the light of the results, we then discuss the potential applications of Inflashoe, in particular targeting specific kinds of pain or injury

    Agricultural Structures and Mechanization

    Get PDF
    In our globalized world, the need to produce quality and safe food has increased exponentially in recent decades to meet the growing demands of the world population. This expectation is being met by acting at multiple levels, but mainly through the introduction of new technologies in the agricultural and agri-food sectors. In this context, agricultural, livestock, agro-industrial buildings, and agrarian infrastructure are being built on the basis of a sophisticated design that integrates environmental, landscape, and occupational safety, new construction materials, new facilities, and mechanization with state-of-the-art automatic systems, using calculation models and computer programs. It is necessary to promote research and dissemination of results in the field of mechanization and agricultural structures, specifically with regard to farm building and rural landscape, land and water use and environment, power and machinery, information systems and precision farming, processing and post-harvest technology and logistics, energy and non-food production technology, systems engineering and management, and fruit and vegetable cultivation systems. This Special Issue focuses on the role that mechanization and agricultural structures play in the production of high-quality food and continuously over time. For this reason, it publishes highly interdisciplinary quality studies from disparate research fields including agriculture, engineering design, calculation and modeling, landscaping, environmentalism, and even ergonomics and occupational risk prevention

    Corseto: A Kinesthetic Garment for Designing, Composing for, and Experiencing an Intersubjective Haptic Voice

    Get PDF
    We present a novel intercorporeal experience - an intersubjective haptic voice. Through an autobiographical design inquiry, based on singing techniques from the classical opera tradition, we created Corsetto, a kinesthetic garment for transferring somatic reminiscents of vocal experience from an expert singer to a listener. We then composed haptic gestures enacted in the Corsetto, emulating upper-body movements of the live singer performing a piece by Morton Feldman named Three Voices. The gestures in the Corsetto added a haptics-based \u27fourth voice\u27 to the immersive opera performance. Finally, we invited audiences who were asked to wear Corsetto during live performances. Afterwards they engaged in micro-phenomenological interviews. The analysis revealed how the Corsetto managed to bridge inner and outer bodily sensations, creating a feeling of a shared intercorporeal experience, dissolving boundaries between listener, singer and performance. We propose that \u27intersubjective haptics\u27 can be a generative medium not only for singing performances, but other possible intersubjective experiences

    Sixth Aerospace Mechanisms Symposium

    Get PDF
    Design and development of mechanisms for spacecraft components - conference

    Beyond the frame: intermedia and expanded cinema in 1960-1970s Japan

    Get PDF
    This thesis examines what intermedia meant for artists and critics in 1960s-70s Japan in order to investigate the intermediality of Japanese expanded cinema. While demonstrating the ability for mediums to interact, intermedia highlights the particularities of a medium through the process of juxtaposition. The historical theorisation of medium interactions are outlined in Part I, which addresses the distinctiveness of intermedia from others and provides an overview on the ways Japanese artists and critics responded to intermedia in the 1960s. While proposing a discourse on medium interactions pre-existed intermedia's arrival as a term in Japan in the form of synthesis arts (sōgō geijutsu), I will delineate the meaning of intermedia in 1960s Japan using three events that incorporated the word in its titles: Intermedia at Runami Gallery; Intermedia Art Festival; and Cross Talk Intermedia. Performances with projections, projections onto bodies and projections onto balloons are analysed in Part II as recurring tendencies in Japanese expanded cinema to demonstrate the ways the potential for performative action inherent in the apparatus of film projection was accentuated through staging an interaction with performance. Seeking alternative surfaces for projection, the works revealed the amorphous qualities of light projection usually concealed in the experience of film. Part III discusses relations between film, audience and space that are established in the spatial projections of Japanese expanded cinema. I will analyse film emancipated from the prescribed codes of the cinema space in the pavilions of Expo '70, psychedelic shows in underground discotheques and early film installations, to discuss how film projection participated in the critical turn to environment (kankyō) in Japanese contemporary art. Through its historical overview, the thesis will show the intermediality of Japanese expanded cinema was demonstrated by its performative and spatial approaches to film projection that staged an opportunity to compare film with other mediums

    Cumulative Index to NASA Tech Briefs, 1963 - 1966

    Get PDF
    Cumulative index of NASA Tech Briefs dealing with electrical and electronic, physical science and energy sources, materials and chemistry, life science, and mechanical innovation

    Cumulative index to NASA Tech Briefs, 1963-1967

    Get PDF
    Cumulative index to NASA survey on technology utilization of aerospace research outpu

    Bathrooms, bubbles and systems : archigram and the landscapes of transience

    Get PDF
    Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 168-175).The dissertation studies the Archigram, the primary avant-garde architectural publication in Britain from 1961 to 1970, and the related avant-garde practices that engendered the high-tech movement. Drawing on the histories of technology, architecture and popular culture, the study explores the roots of architecture's foray into the realm of electronic information. By challenging the machine-based model of technology that had defined modernist architectural theory and production, my thesis unfolds, the publishers of the Archigram struggled to reconcile architectural form with emerging technologies and to represent visually the dissolution of the artifact into a landscape of complex and indeterminate systems. This attempt to conceive an essentially material object, such as a house, in a world viewed as a series of impulses was among the earliest architectural explorations of the dilemmas introduced by electronic culture. Using the concept of mobility and flux as a unifying thread, the dissertation examines the strategy for developing an architecture based in the practice of representation and of dissemination. The desire to set structures in motion by liberating them from the anchor of urban infrastructures required a reconsideration of the architectural object. For architecture to fully abandon its traditional role as environmental hardware, the conflict between the processes of indeterminacy and the dependence of those processes on a closed system would have to be overcome.(cont.) This tension between the physical and the dematerialized led from megastructural networks to self-contained skins, and finally to the disintegration of architectural objects into a technologically driven version of the Picturesque. In the ultimate merging of the environmental domain with that of information, architecture would become its absence, marked in the landscape only as the residue of a nomadic culture of information.by Hadas A. Steiner.Ph.D
    corecore