Hello, I’m Seungwoo Je from Industrial Design at KAIST. I will introduce our exciting project.
Elevate, a walkable pin-array for large shape-changing terrains.
This paper collaborates with great researchers. Hyunseung Lim, Kongpyung Moon, Shan-Yuan Teng,
Jas Brooks, Professor Pedro Lopes and advised by Professor Andrea Bianchi.
First, what is Elevate?
Elevate is 1.8m by 0.6m Large shape-changing display that can generate various high-resolution terrains.
As you can see users can stand on it and walk on it.
And you can even lay on it.
It means it is large enough and strong enough to carry human weights.
So, What can we do with Elevate?
Here, we suggest four possible applications.
The first application is landscape.
Users can directly walk and experience various terrains mapped with the terrain in virtual reality.
The second application is stairs.
Step by step, the haptic experience of climbing stairs enhances the immersion of virtual reality.
Elevate can create various types of stairs by adjusting the width and height.
The third application is stepping stones.
Users can throw stones around the cliff. step on it. and can cross the cliff.
In this application, users can experience the dynamically changing terrain through interactions in VR.
The last application is a mini-golf application.
Users can design the mini-golf field by the web application.
Once they finalize their design, elevate immediately updates the golf field.
Users can enjoy fun games in different fields depending on their skills.
you can repeat the sequence of fields to obtain dynamic obstacles.
How does it work?
Elevate is consist of three main parts.
Pin-array display, Locking system, and shape generator.
There are exactly 1200 wood pins with 14400 magnets.
The length and width of the pin are 3cm by 3cm.
And this has 10 discrete height resolutions with 1.5cm per level.
Therefore, Elevate can generate high-resolution terrain.
The shape generator has 10 actuator modules with two DC motors for each.
so In total, you can push and pull 20 pins
a single row at the same time.
The shape generator moves horizontally with two stepper motors.
This push and pull large pin-array display just with 10 actuator modules.
It can pull the pin down by activating the electromagnet.
To make sure the user can stand on it. We developed our custom locking system.
It can lock 80 pins of 4 rows at a time.
Once the pin is elevated, the aluminum shaft moves into the notch of the pin.
This is how the pin holds the human weight.
So, HOW WAS IT MADE?
We started with a single-pin control to build a large pin-array display.
We designed a custom encoding system and lifting gearbox.
And then, We gradually increased the number of pins.
We glued 12 magnets for each pin manually.
We have to make sure that the magnet perfectly insert. Otherwise, It stuck in the grid.
We used more than 100 super glues.
Look at the kongpyung’s face. Looks tired.
To minimize the friction between wood pins, we have sanded all four sides of the pins.
and remember there are 1200 pins
Finally, we synchronized virtual terrain environment with the terrain created by Elevate.
Thank you for listening. This guy actively looking for a job. Please reach me out.