I spent my weekend at the Maker Faire in Paris to present both the TeleMandala and my prototype. It was a great opportunity to meet people and to get feedback. My first impressions concerning the prototype were that 0.5cm is way too thick. 0.3 is okay, 0.2 is perfect. The next thing to test was the material: is it more interesting to have a wood render or a plastic render ? 50% of the people preferred the wood, 50% preferred the plastic. In my opinion, I prefer the wooden render but I think it could be an interesting idea to create both. Or maybe people preferred the plastic because of the black color and the contrast it made ? Meaning it could be made of wood but then tainted in black ? I think that this is a better idea than using plastic. Because it could be a great argument to sell the product but also a way to be more respectful towards the natural environment.

I met Cécile Quach, of the City of Paris. She told me that it would be interesting to take part in the “Hackging the de l’Hôtel de Ville” at the end of May. I also met members from the Innovation HUB of Epitech school. I told them about my project because there is a part I won’t be able to prototype fast enough because I won’t be able to mix a coded part with a prototyped part [with softwares like Pixate]. I just sent them a mail with the details of my project, I hope to talk to them soon.

The images below describe the fast prototype I made to test the interest of people ans their preference for a black phone case with colored animations or a wooden phone case with pure white animations.

Prototype Day 1 – Photo by Vassili Glezos