Title
Funbrella: making rain fun
Abstract
Rain changes its complexion based on the time and the place. Each aspect of rain provides a unique impression, so experiencing it in distant places and different times would be a new way of sharing information. To represent rain, we focused on an umbrella as a user interface to connect humans and rain. Generally, people experience rain with sounds, sights, or sometimes smells; however, in our proposed system, we exploit the vibration perceived through an umbrella's handle to let people feel the rain. We implemented a vibration-giving mechanism based on a speaker and microphone not only to give vibrations but also to record them so that they reconstruct rain. Using this mechanism, we propose a novel umbrella-like user interface named "Funbrella" that can record and replay the rain with FUN (Figure 1). We developed two interesting applications. One is to feel various kinds of rain, and the other transmits rain to different places in real time. With such applications, people can enjoy rain that is usually annoying.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1145/1597956.1597966
ACM SIGGRAPH 2009 Emerging Technologies
Keywords
Field
DocType
rain fun,transmits rain,different place,user interface,novel umbrella-like user interface,people experience rain,vibration-giving mechanism,real time,different time,interesting application,distant place,interactivity,constructivism
Interactivity,Computer graphics (images),Computer science,Experiential media,Exploit,Sight,User interface,Multimedia
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.38
0
Authors
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ai Yoshida161.40
Yuichi Itoh242345.98
Ryo Fukazawa3132.58
Kazuyuki Fujita43416.15
Yoshifumi Kitamura51040117.66
Maya Ozaki6102.17
Tetsuya Kikukawa782.17
Fumio Kishino8814119.05