THE INTERACTIVE BALLOON - SENSING, ACTUATION, AND BEHAVIOR IN A COMMON OBJECT

In the not too distant future, new materials for sensing and actuation , together with high-density low-power electronics and embedded comput ation, will bring interaction and intelligence to commonplace inanimat e objects in our environment. As a simple but illustrative example, we have built balloons that can interact conversationally. This paper de scribes this system: the piezoelectric foil that works as an acoustic pickup and speaker on the balloon, ifs audio characteristics, the driv ing electronics, the signal processing, and some applications of this technology at the MIT Media Laboratory.