Making a touchless vibrator with reverse engineering

vibrator

Here's one for the ladies (and men, we guess) out there. [Beth] recently bought a LELO Lyla vibrator for herself, but found operating this wireless vibrator to be an exercise in mood-killing awkwardness. Wanting a more natural interface, she decided to reverse engineer a remote control vibrator. Here's a cache; [Beth]'s blog has been up and down all day. The LELO Lyla comes with a … [Read more...]

Urban Defender: location aware game

What do gangs, territories, cities, and glowing blue balls have in common? No, not that one drunken night you can't seem to remember, rather a new location aware game called Urban Defender. The concept behind the game is simple. A player hold a ball that knows its current location and can notify you if needed via LEDs and a speaker of changes in its environment. He or she then runs around the … [Read more...]

Steampunk vibrator

steampunk_vibrator

[Ani Niow] built this steam powered vibrator. It has a milled stainless steel shell with a brass motor structure. The motor is a Tesla turbine made from a stack of Dremel diamond cutoff wheels. This drives an off-center weight to create the vibration. She tested it using a pressure cooker as the steam source. It worked, but became so hot it had to be held using welding gloves. It works just as … [Read more...]

Haptic compass

north

[eric], inspired by this Wired article, built his own haptic compass. Named "the clown belt", it is a belt with 12 little vibrating motors mounted evenly all around. A digital compass vibrates whichever motor is closest to north at all times. This basically gives the owner an extra sense.  He doesn't go much into his own experiences, but the Wired article mentions "dreaming in north" and feeling … [Read more...]

Wearable haptic devices bestow sixth senses

Engadget recently posted a story about a flexible tactile display that can be wrapped around any part of the body and give haptic feedback to the user. The research team from Korea's Sungkyunkwan University that developed the device are focusing on applications like Braille for the visually impaired or transmitting tactile data to a remote user, but this is just the beginning; the applications for … [Read more...]