Menu
At Archimedes Exhibitions we came up with something completely new: a pocket-sized exhibit.
One of our best-selling exhibits is the Spinning Display. It vividly shows the phenomenon of the “Persistence of Vision”, i. e. the inertia of the eye: The impression of an image lingers on the retina, even after the image itself has already disappeared, because our nerves are not able to transport the stimulus to the brain fast enough.
The original Spinning Display is a big interactive hands-on exhibit that only works within the exhibition context. In an internal competition we have now managed to shrink it to a tiny Shaki – a board with battery, accelerometer and 8 LEDs. The Shaki now also impressively demonstrates the inertia of the eye. The user holds down a button and moves the stick from left to right, and the Shaki paints brilliant pictures into the air. The special part: You can program it individually and enter symbols, icons, or even logos. That way the Shaki incidentally teaches the basics of programming and sparks interest in this field. A great give-away for visitors in science centres and an alternative learning medium for pupils in the classroom.
To share our work so that others can also benefit, we have made the hardware available as open source here. Anyone with the necessary tools can now create and program their own Shaki.
If you don’t feel like creating a Shaki but would still like to own one or several of them, please write us here.
