This time, the range to choose from was much more narrowed down than the last time, and we had decided to start working beforehand and procrastinate less to complete the work in the given frame of time.

We had narrowed down to two options, either customize a personal workspace according to our needs or make something for kids, or perhaps babies, because they need loads of monitoring around them. We thought in that direction and came up with a few ideas, but then there were certain changes and our area of work was increased to a whole workspace than just a mere piece of furniture. We had to make a usable prototype too and we realised how making a prototype baby-safe will be actually very tough and we couldn’t afford to risk anything in that scenario.

Then we started from scratch thinking what all we could do, we were practically lost all over again and the deadline was nearing and we hadn’t decided the idea yet. We discussed a lot and finally came up with more ideas, and went to our instructors to seek some guidance as to what to do.

We had other ideas like, a greeting table, game table, doodle table, automated raincover, parking system using RF Ids and a few more including the current mat.

This time we wanted to do something fun, something beyond generic. We were having loads of ideas and when we finalized working on a yoga mat, the first thing that hit, was the game twister. Most of us have played this game and it’s a damn fun game. And it is played on the mat sort of thing too, so it seemed like a good idea to implement that on the mat.

Now, Aditya wouldn’t accept it that we do something for fun only (you become like that after doing years of JEE prep and not having a life), and wanted to do something which involved some sort of learning too. His favourite subject is maths (sad). So, we ended up implementing basic arithmetic along with twister on a yoga mat, without compromising on the flexibility, foldability and usability of the mat.

We had done our research and found out about velostat sheet, basically a plastic like sheet which is conductive in nature and offers variable resistance according to the pressure applied on it. It was black gold for us and we tried all possible ways to find it. We were unsuccessful to find it in market and the delivery time online was taking way too long.

We checked in all the labs in our college and luckily enough, we got some of it from the Weave Lab, in our college. Now, we tried using it to sense pressure and other purposes, but turned out that it was not very accurate and we weren’t able to scale the differences the way we wanted to. So we had to go back to touch sensors.

Again we managed to achieve most of the functionalities we had planned for the mat, and this time we might have done a better job than last time.

We built an actual working prototype on an human scale.