Inventor Creates Haptic Weather Forecast Cube

Robb Godshaw has a job a lot of people fantasize about. He invents stuff. He is described by his employer, Syynlabs, as a professional tinkerer and "a maker of funky whats-its." Among many other inventions, Godshaw has created what he and Syynlabs are calling, Cryoscope. It's a haptic (conveyer of sensory information) device that is used to convey a weather forecast to those who touch it.

He says he started with the idea over a year ago, and the first mock-up was little more than a wooden box with a metal surface. After further refinement, the Cyroscope is now a completely metal cube that when touched by the fingers, demonstrates very clearly to the owner, how warm or cold it will be outside tomorrow.

Clearly it's not rocket science, the Cyroscope connects to the Internet and grabs the latest local weather report regarding the following daytime temperature. It then uses that number to heat or cool the surface temperature of the cube. Thus, when someone touches it, they get an actual feel for how warm or cold it will be the next day. But, the smartness factor of this device isn't in how it works, it's in the concept itself. Godshaw says people are really lousy at converting numbers to sensory information in their heads. What's a few degrees difference on a thermometer anyway, he asks, but a quasi-referential analysis that literally, in most cases, turns out to be meaningless. In contrast, when someone touches the Cyroscope, because they want to know what it's going to feel like outside tomorrow, they actually feel it and come away with some information they can really use.

And that's the concept behind most of what Godshaw invents. He takes ordinary things, and makes them more humanistic. Take the average beverage cozy; its shape is almost always round to mimic the shape of the can. The problem with that, says Godshaw is that our hands were never designed to grasp round things. Instead, his cozy is hexagonal, providing a corner to wrap fingertips around no matter how it's first grasped. Or his E-Z sleeve edible cupcake liners that are made out of the same stuff as ice cream cones.

Syyn Labs creates interactive art for agencies, brands and production companies, and Godshaw's real title is associate engineer. And while the Cyroscope may be an idea whose time has come, it's not likely to any time soon as the company has no plans to market it. But that could change if those that hear about it start asking for one of their own.