Sadly, not everyone is born with the ability to draw. You can take lessons and practice, but sometimes you have to accept that stick figures and clouds are at the top of your skillset.
A new project by designer/engineer Saurabh Datta may bring hope for the hopeless. Datta, a student at Copenhagen’s Institute of Interaction Design, created a series of machines that use "forced haptic feedback" to teach the wearer how to do things like press keys on a piano or draw images on a canvas.
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The Teacher device features an arm with a strap at the wrist and another wearable component that goes over the hand and fingers. "The aim of this system and software was to understand the negotiations people make when machine and humans have different perspective and same goal," Datta told Wired about the series of machines that he built in a week. He found that people naturally wanted to resist the machines that were controlling their movements, but as the tests went on and the machines adapted to the movements of the users, they became "more capable of making human-centered decisions." With repetition, Datta thinks that the machines could effectively teach instead of simply controlling.
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As a thesis project, don't expect these devices to be sold in your local art supply store anytime soon. But the ideas and the prototypes are interesting, and could be a sign of things to come. Whether or not it's a future we want to see is still unclear.
[via Wired]
