This January I was back to Bangalore once again. This trip was a great one. There is something different about Bangalore – the kind of awesome people you get to meet there, and the ambiance as a whole is great!
MIT Media Labs Design Innovation Workshop
One workshop, that I will never regret attending. From the MIT guys we interacted with to the other attendees, the bunch of people that this workshop brought together is incredible. I was in the Tangible User Interfaces track with my instructors being Anirudh Sharma and Daniel Leithinger. I got introduced to the values of inter-disciplinary work and the level of innovation that can be reached through it. A way to find innovative solutions to problems from our daily lives or how we could make certain things easier.
My project was to design a human posture detection kit, something that could trace how we move our hands, whether the posture we are in causes strain in the body, etc. With this we planned to study the ergonomics of the human body.
Finally we came up with our prototype system – a gloves equipped with flex sensors and haptic feedback mechanism connected to an Arduino board. A couple of hand-made pressure sensors that we made by sticking together sponge strips and aluminum foil. What we generated was interesting data on how different hand movements and working conditions affected the stress conditions on our hand. Using the pressure sensors that we made we could generate pressure gradients for seats, using which it was possible to figure out how people sit generally. Our haptic feedback mechanism, we could provide feedback to the user in case of any erroneous or potential harmful posture.
We have open-sourced the code at https://github.com/sankha93/biosense/.
Firefox OS App Days
A trip to Bangalore is always incomplete without some open-source or tech meet-up. Last time I came here it was JSFoo 2012. This time it was Firefox OS App Days, a series of global events conducted by Mozilla to get people to know and develop apps for the Firefox OS platform. It was a great experience interacting with Matt Basta and Arun Ganesan who flew all the way from the Mozilla HQ to Bangalore for the event. Moreover, it was my first time as Mozilla Rep I was attending an event and meeting the full Mozilla India community.
After the little intro by Matt and Arun about Firefox OS, it was Hackathon and people came with real cool apps for Firefox OS. Few of us were busy providing tech-support and getting people started on building apps for Firefox OS. By the afternoon, I could see people presenting apps on education, real-time content sharing and information search apps powered by Wolfram Alpha, etc. And guess what? All the teams with great apps won a free Firefox OS Developer Preview Phone.
So another trip to Bangalore, well spent! (And a few other incidents that happened and I am not blogging about! 😉 )
The Limbeck 