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Google’s AI hardware, in new hands

The Jury’s Choice Award went to Team Visionaries, Dennis Dietz, Stefan Langer, Kyrill Schmid, Daniel Neumann and Felix Dietz from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, who developed a haptic vest with a camera. “The vest is intended for visually impaired people,” the team explained. “We have vibration sensors in the back, and it detects objects in front of the person wearing it so that they can then navigate around these obstacles.”

Team MountainSoil, Keitaro Tsuchiya, Hiroo Yamamura and Daisuke Yamamoto from Keio University Graduate School of Media Design in Japan, received a Jury’s Choice Honorable Mention award for a system that monitored a person’s facial expression and used a robotic arm to draw it as a manga character on a transparent pane in front of their face. They were also awarded a People’s Choice Honorable Mention Award. 


Team Greens, Shou-En Tsai, Shang-Hsun Lu and Hsin-Yu Yao, from National Chiao Tung University and National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan received a Jury’s Choice Honorable Mention award for their robotic shape display that used projection mapping to visualize environmental impact. “Our goal was to raise people’s awareness to show them how humans affect the environment,” the students said. They were also awarded the People’s Choice Award. 


“Our project is about enabling people who are suffering from hearing loss to experience nature,” said Team Nature in a Box. The team, Wagram Airiian and Marla Narazani from TU in Munich, Germany, had a vision of providing haptic experiences using a machine learning pipeline that transformed the sounds of bird songs to tactile sensations in gloves worn by the user.


Team UCLA-HCI out of the University of California and comprised of Ruolin Wang and Hsuan-Wei Fan, presented a related accessibility project, where a robotic camera monitored the surroundings to provide guidance for people with tunnel vision. “Our basic concept is that we use a camera that rotates from left to right to detect the objects.”


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