Sphero

“A virtual sphere around you to help you track the things you care about and carry along.”

Implemented using RF communications.
An Arduino-based smartphone application that ameliorates the concept of a human-centered virtual cloud sphere and keeps a track of things we care about. It allows tagging of your important stuff with help of RFID smart card stickers. If you accidentally move away from your stuff or the stuff moves away from you, it will notify on your smartphone using communication techniques provided by Arduino. It also allows virtual social networking to share things with your friends in real life. This project was prototyped and developed at Design Innovation Workshop, Delhi conducted by MIT Media Lab.

Team
Kunal Gupta, Sagar Mohite, Nishank Varshney

Mentors
Nan Zhao, Nan Wei Gong (MIT Media Lab)

Sphero Presentation:
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MIT Media Labs Design & Innovation Workshop India – 2012

March 26-30, 2012

Location
Apeejay Stya University, Delhi.

I reached Delhi from Bangalore around 10:30 AM and took an auto for Apeejay School, Seikh Sarai. From the registration counter, I got my Identity card for the track Sensor Mediated Environments.

Designing from the real world:

We were instructed to do a field trip in order to observe the common problems and sketch them out and come with one or many solutions. It was a great learning for me in terms of how to spot a problem, understand it, give it a name and find out the way to solve it.

We sketched the problems that we saw around, during the field trip. Once we were back, we worked in groups of 4 to design a solution for that problem we had picked.

Our Mentors, Nan Zhao, Nan Wei Gong helped us a lot as we were foggy about the idea and not sure if this is the direction we wanted to go into. They advised us on how to sieve out the unnecessary details and focus on solving the core problem.

PS: Learn more about the idea and the prototype here.

Team Sphero with the Mentors

For the next three days, we all were discussing the use cases, scenarios and did the rapid prototyping. and on the last day, we presented the working prototype to the guests, mentors, and visitors. It was a great experience for me to learn about other Teams’ ideas and their thought process.

The workshop provided a platform for us to learn the principals of design and techniques for innovation and building ideas in a short time frame. I loved all the sessions and prototyping our idea.

Team Sphero: Kunal Gupta, Sagar Mohite, Nishank Varshney, Vivek Anand

Mentors: Nan Zhao, Nan Wei Gong (MIT Media Lab)

Project details and code can be found here: https://github.com/touchaddict/MIT-Media-Lab-Design-and-Innovation-workshop