This Saturday a bunch of us from the lab went to Gifu prefecture. The occasion was the finals of IVRC 2008, a contest where different students come up with crazy ideas mixing the virtual and the real. A team from my lab had advanced to the finals, facing four other teams from various universities. The emphasis in this contest seems to be on creativity over practicality, which is fine by me.

Going back a few months, when I arrived in Japan, the team members described their idea to me. The idea is called “Funbrella” or asobrella in Japanese (I think. Maybe ansobrella). It is an umbrella that can record and play back the umbrella experience. There is a magnet and coil (basically a microphone/speaker) built into the structure of the umbrella, and if you go outside when it is raining it will record the vibrations of the rain hitting the umbrella. Then later on you can replay the tactile experience of holding an umbrella in the rain. Or, you can hook two umbrellas together over a network and “feel” the other person’s umbrella experience. Pretty crazy I think, and cool.

What I thought at the time, however, in addition to the idea being crazy and cool, was that there was no way it could work. The vibrations caused by the raindrops are far too small to be picked up by the microphone. You simply won’t be able to record anything meaningful. So, I wished the team members the best of luck, and hoped that if things didn’t work they would at least be able to learn from the experience.

Well, it turns out that I was totally wrong. I went to Gifu, tried out the funbrella, and the thing is freaking amazing. It works shockingly well. You hold onto the thing, they press a button on an iPod, and you feel the rain hitting the funbrella. Or they press another button and you feel marbles. They press a different one and you feel natto hitting it (natto doesn’t feel like much). The other demo is the networked funbrellas. You can hold one funbrella, hit the other one on the top, and it feels like you are hitting your own funbrella. Spooky, and excellent.

So, I was wrong. The team members were right, and I applaud them for having the vision and perserverence to carry the project through. Unfortunately they didn’t win the grand prize. That went to another excellent project, Yotaro, a virtual baby made out of rubber that has a genuine runny nose and wriggles around.