I received the most amazing product shots of our end assignment Interaction Design today which I didn't want to hold for myself! Tack so mycket Per & Adam. (So far my best Swedish)

Cool Robby, but what is it?

Well folks: a helmet.. BUT it crosses your senses! On the inside you can see what you normally would hear and hear what you would see on the outside. Got it? If not, read again. That was the setup & goal of our project after a lot of brainstorming. We didn't had clue how to realize this at the start, but as the project went through many stages we overcame all of our problems. Eventually it looked like a. - what's the name of those white guys in star wars again? ..a trooper? gosh, nerdy post - Anyway, you know what I mean.

The helmet itself we made out of isolation fabric. Once we shaped it with some intensive sanding, we put on some white car paint - with on top of it; a fancy layer of varnish to make it shiny.

Then the electronics: on the front we hooked up both ping and sound sensors all around. Ping measures distance, and sound.. well sound. They are actually just microphones. On the inside we created a display out of LED's. We got 4 microchips to control 64 LED's which serve us as "pixels" According to the sound, patterns are generated on this home made screen. The LED's can light up in 3 different colours. It's a really cool effect. Further on there are some nice soft earphones build in on the sides. On these a tone is generated according to the proximity of objects surrounding the helmet. You can hear if something is near you on the right, left or middle. You could compare it with a sonar system in a submarine.

The whole helmet is powered with some nine volt batteries and weighs about 6 kg. It's controlled with 2 of these Arduino boards. This makes it possible to walk around with it, but it might cause neck injuries after wandering around for a long time

At the moment the project is on it's way to Spain. More details on it's website.

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