Community
Partners: Tripty Project – A sustainable fashion organization based out of Oakland, CA and Bangladesh that develops and manufactures beautiful textiles that are fairly produced and have low carbon footprints.
Follow the Honey – A honey distributor that pushes farmers in the developing world to engage in farming practices that are friendlier to pollinators by creating a market for their honey. Organized under the auspices of #BlackHivesMatter.
Curious Sound Objects – A community art show in Cambridge, MA that provided the creative prompt which kicked off this year long research project into Electro-Luminescient materials.
Technological Development through art, not war.
Colleagues: We would like to thank LumiLor and ILuminate, two other organizations who are actively engaged in exploring the potential of Electroluminecient materials for meeting with us and letting us use their footage.
Hacker-Spaces: This project owes a great debt to the presence of open community spaces which provided access to electronics test benches and expertise. Free of charge.
In particular, we would like to acknowledge Miters and Noisebridge.
Team: Atoms – Akivo Vekhter – 35 years ago in Moldova in the USSR, Akivo designed and built oscilloscopes from scratch in his free time because he couldn’t get the devices he wanted in a store. Since then, he emigrated to the US, and has spent the past 25 years designing and manufacturing high precision sensors for NASA space suits, aircraft landing gears, and everything in between.
Bits – Josh Vekhter – For almost a decade, Josh has been exploring ways in which interactive visualizations can be used to expand our collective understanding of the world, in fields ranging from math to journalism, from 3d printing to (now) wearable technology. One exploration that has made it’s way onto the internet is http://foolzone.com/lets-get-lost/.
Representation – Nicole Hogarty – Artist in Residence
Contributors: Many others enriched this project with their energy and presence through the course of it’s development.
In particular, we’d like to thank friends for their (chronological) contributions, specifically: Xenia/Gila – Loom, Josh Gordonson – early excitement, Manuel Schwab – Berlin, Rachel Milito – exploration, Sam Pelts – a car and a jellyfish, Megan Baker – housing, Peter Fedek – VR, Emma Kanter – filming and editing, Esther Shang – polish and direction, Zanzie Addington-White – post production.
Background track, Every Bone – Big History.
We’d also like to thank Dan, Mom, and Grandma for all the support.
Press Kit
If you are a member of the press and need more resources, please contact us at [email protected]
Images & Video Downloads
Please feel free to share any of our Kickstarter page materials on social media.
Risks and challenges
We have been developing the Whoa Board for more than a year, and have produced 5 full design iterations – our last run consisted of 17 boards which we have delivered to alpha testers around the world.
As a team, we have decades of experience shipping complex hardware and software projects, and we are confident that the core LumiSense technology will provide a solid platform for discovering all sorts of new interactions.
However, there are several challenges that we must still tackle in order to ship this board:
Component Sourcing: The Whoa board makes use of several somewhat unconventional hardware components. We will be able to ship the first 1000 units quickly using existing stocks, but beyond that, there will be a several month lead time to obtain certain components.
Quality Control: Good QC is a major focus of ours. We plan to hand test the the initial production run in order to arrive at a streamlined testing procedure which we will then implement at a factory for any additional runs that occur.
We are running this kickstarter to get the Whoa board out into the world and to rally a creative community interested in exploring a totally new frontier of wearable technology. Pledge to join u
For more detail: Whoa Board: Dream With Touch Sensing EL Wire, Panels, Paint