A Tactile Luminous Floor Used as a Playful Space’s Skin*

A tactile luminous floor for an interactive autonomous space

This paper describes the interactive tactile luminous floor that was constructed and used as the skin of the playful interactive space Ada, which ran as a public exhibit for five months in 2002 and had over 550,000 visitors. Ada’s floor was custom-built to provide a means for individual and collective user interaction. It consists of 360 hexagonal 66 cm tiles covering a total area of 136 m2, ea...

Using a luminous-tactile floor and auditory signal processing to make an automatic disco

The mother of all disco floors

We describe the floor used as the skin of the playful interactive space Ada, which was part of the Swiss National Exhibition Expo.02. The floor consisted of 360 hexagonal tiles, each of which comprised an aluminum frame, a glass top, a microcontroller, analog load sensors, and dimmable red, green, and blue neon lamps. A factory automation bus sensed and controlled the tiles. We developed softwa...

Assimilation of virtual legs and perception of floor texture by complete paraplegic patients receiving artificial tactile feedback

Spinal cord injuries disrupt bidirectional communication between the patient's brain and body. Here, we demonstrate a new approach for reproducing lower limb somatosensory feedback in paraplegics by remapping missing leg/foot tactile sensations onto the skin of patients' forearms. A portable haptic display was tested in eight patients in a setup where the lower limbs were simulated using immers...

Ground Me ! An Interactive Sound Art Installation

This paper describes the design, implementation and outcome of Ground Me!, an interactive sound installation set up in the Sonic Lab of the Sonic Arts Research Centre. The site-specific interactive installation consists of multiple copper poles hanging from the Sonic Lab’s ceiling panels, which trigger samples of electricity sounds when grounded through the visitor's’ body to the space’s metall...