Cuddly - Mobile Phone Reacts To Being Squeezed
Written by Harry Fairhead   
Sunday, 02 June 2013

You might not be into soft toys, but Cuddly is a brilliant lateral thinking use of a mobile phone's sensors to create an animated toy. 

The idea is simple. You place a mobile phone inside a soft toy and program it to react to a squeeze - hence the name Cuddly. The child is supposed to cuddle, pet or stroke the soft toy to get a sound played or even something to happen on the screen.

 

cuddly3

 

The idea may be simple but how do you get a phone to sense a cuddle? 

If you are thinking near field or proximity sensors you are way too complicated - and I have no idea if they would work. What does seem to work well is the method invented for the Cuddly app. The idea is that you switch on the phone's flash and use the camera to measure the amount of light it can "see". With the phone surrounded by soft toy stuffing the amount of light back scattered to the camera is a function of how dense the stuffing is i.e how much it is being squeezed. 

 

cuddly1

 

It's an "I wish I'd thought of that" idea.

Take a look at the video of it in action, which explains how it works: 

 

The big limitation with the approach is the restricted range of things the phone can do in response. It can clearly make noises and the phone's vibrator might be able to come into use - but in both cases the stuffing might be a problem. Also, the example of playing a game requires the top part of the phone to be uncovered which isn't particularly natural. You could add devices to the phone but this would spoil the simplicity of the 100% software solution.

Any ideas, anyone?

 

cuddly2

More Information

Yuta Sugiura

Related Articles

Puppets To Teach Electronics       

Inflatable Robots - Safe and a Lot of Fun!       

RFID Toys       

 

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, install the I Programmer Toolbar, subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on, Twitter, FacebookGoogle+ or Linkedin,  or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

 

raspberry pi books

 

Comments




or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info

 

Banner


Generative AI Training For All On Coursera
04/03/2024

Generative AI is on the loose, getting into business and commerce as well as into art, poetry and coding. Already useful, it  will become ever more useful as long as we use it properly. Coursera  [ ... ]



Run WebAssembly Components Inside Node.js With Jco
28/03/2024

Jco 1.0 has been just announced by the Bytecode Alliance.It's a native JavaScript WebAssembly toolchain and runtime that runs Wasm components inside Node.js. Why is that useful?


More News

 

Last Updated ( Sunday, 02 June 2013 )