MAGIC PILLOW

A window to a magical world

The Story

It all started with a competetion at Angelhack Hackathon. Thirty first of May 2014, me with my team, Shubhankar Potdar and Muthukumaran were working on Augmented Reality for tangible surfaces. We came up with the concept of enhancing reading experience by making the inanimate and still pictures of books by bringing them to life. We tracked the features of the book and augmented related characters and videos on top of the book itself. Winning the second prize at this hackathon me and Shubhankar along with Venali Sonone continued our two day development for the next 3 months.

Continuing it further we stretched its capability across various platforms, right from straight walls to curved pillows. You can watch a video of its further developments here

The Background

Augmenting on inanimate objects always had one purpose for us, Enhancing Consumer Experience. Whether it may be for advertisement of a product or better understanding of a book on Anatomy of Human Body, we looked forward for an complete immersive experience for the user. The use of inanimate objects played an integral part in developing tactile feedback. People like to touch real 3D objects than simply scribbling on a 2D mobile screen. For this, we included virtual buttons on objects in real world that would allow people to interact with these objects which has turned out to be one of the best ways of Human Computer Interaction, and thus we quote: "We have only one purpose, Enhancing Consumer Experience". Magic Pillow is one of our best creations and it is no less than a window to a magical new world. Working as a part of MIT Media Lab India Initiative not only encouraged us to take our projects further but also guided us on the way of product development.

Talk at TEDx

21 September 2014

Magic Pillow was presented at one of the world's best International Conference, TED. BITS Hyderabad conducted TEDx Conference in which Magic Pillow was presented as a part of MIT Media Lab India Initiative. It came out as a surprise to almost everyone there as to how a normal pillow could be used as so much more. TEDx Talk gave us unique feedback about our project suggesting changes for an even better experience.

VIDEO

Videos

Magic Pillow -- Kaustubh Shividkar

The Technology of Emotions -- Mani Shankar

Meet the Creators