Amelia Li is threading wires into bits of hardware scattered on a table. As she alternates between red, yellow, blue and green, the master's student of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University keeps the fixated attention of a seamstress. The experimental contraption will go into the wheelchair of Jennifer Phillips who sits next to her.
"I guess I am the test subject," said Phillips, a freelance writer who has used a wheelchair since age 4 due to arthrogryposis, an inborn condition affecting muscular development around the joints.
The upgrade will outfit her chair with ultrasonic sensors that cause it to vibrate when they detect nearby objects. The tech setup could help wheelchair users move around city sidewalks. It also could be a lot of fun, if utilized in a maze or obstacle course.
The object-sensing chair is one project concocted and developed within 48 hours at ChairJam, a hackathon for creating tech-based entertainment experiences that incorporate wheelchairs, held Oct. 18-20 at CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute's building on South Craig Street. Other sponsors for the weekend included CMU's Center for Arts in Society and Arizona State University's Arts & Humanities in Games program.
The goal is to put chair users at the table (literally) with tech makers, disability advocates and student designers from the Entertainment Technology Center, a two-year professional graduate program for interactive entertainment across fields.
"It places us as a peer and equal in the process of creation and that's different from how we've been treated," said co-organizer Theresa Devine, a video game designer, associate professor at Arizona State University and wheelchair user.