It seems we are now veterans of developing attractions for MWC. Our pedigree includes three attractions for the Chinese company AsiaInfo ( http://www.asiainfo.com )
2014 – Our Running Kinect Game:
2015 – Oculus Rift VR with Magic LEAP hand tracking:
Then in 2017 AsiaInfo pulled their European presence and we took a couple of years out from MWC. Now we have a new customer who wanted to see what bag of tricks we could provide, and we were back to the Congress again with a brand-new idea.
Our new customer is the “Cambridge Graphene Centre” ( https://www.graphene.cam.ac.uk/ ) who are part of the Graphene Flagship ( http://graphene-flagship.eu/ ), an EU funded group of 145 partners in 21 countries all investigating and prototyping a multitude of ideas that might be possible with Graphene. Our specific part of the pavilion was to show off a screen printed pressure / weight analyser that is passively achieved from capacitance where current pressure and weight sensors mostly work through resistance. The accuracy of this magic material can detect weight to the level of milligrams or it can be to the level of grams depending on the recipe of graphene foam that is used in the printing process. We were using a shoe sole screen printed with 6 inputs that are wired to a Bluetooth transmitter to get the signal out to a PC:
We then take that signal from shoes and we can do some funky things with it on a PC. For instance using it as a direct feedback foot heatmap so we can detect weight on the shoes.
This allows the medical world to detect recovery in Parkinson’s or Diabetic Patients as well as analysing children’s walking to see if they are developing correctly.
It also allows the sporting industry to achieve things such as “Gait analysis” or honing on many sporting techniques.
Another great possibility of this technology is to use the shoes as gaming inputs to achieve gaming in Virtual Reality. We demonstrated this with a snowboarding game:
The week progressed with excellent enthusiasm to try on the shoes and learn more about what is possible with Graphene as a wearable. The snowboarding was a big hit and caused many a smile which is always what I like to see on my stand attractions.
As always, I thoroughly enjoyed being out in Barcelona and being a part of the mobile World Congress again for 2019 and I look forward to working with the Cambridge Graphene Centre again to see what we can do for #MWC20
Lindsay.
blog.thefusionworks.com 
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