Pneuxels
Manoj Deshpande, Saquib Sarwar, Atefeh Mahdavi Goloujeh, Dimitris Papanikolaou · 2019
We often perceive other peoples' presence implicitly, through the traces of their interactions with physical objects. What if our urban environments could mediate these traces allowing remotely located people perceive each other's presence collectively? We developed Pneuxels, a network of programmable inflatables, placed at remote sites, that allow visitors in one site to perceive the presence of visitors in other sites, promoting thereby a sense of collective awareness and place-making. Pneuxels (Pneumatic Pixels) are pneumatically actuated pixels, connected through a web-socket platform, that change their physical state based on input from other Pneuxels, from the environment, or from users. We discuss our experiences in designing, prototyping, and testing Pneuxels, and we report our results from preliminary user studies.