The seismic wave simulator

The seismic wave simulator

Nick Duarte and Blas Di Tella

Blind people cannot experience most things the way that people with vision can. We may learn things not from first-hand experience but from movies or diagrams. The visually impaired can only experience things through touch, they can’t experience most if not all natural disasters. So my partner Blas and I thought it would be a great idea to help the blind experience a natural disaster through touch. At the beginning we had a hard time visualizing what we wanted our project to look like, I needed some help from David because I did not fully understand what some natural disasters are. We drew a few models, and after some trial and error we came up with an idea similar to a youtube video. We came up with an idea to create a box with water and an automatic mechanism that moves back and forth to simulate a tsunami. It took a while to create all of the parts that we needed in rhino. Our first prototype in cardboard and it was almost as perfect as we planned it, but we found out that the top piece of the mechanism was too long and we had to cut it down. Currently, we are in our final iteration and it is almost done. We have cut most of our pieces in wood, we just need to cut the rest of the box.