So, now we have this robotic hand that can teach us how to draw! If this is true, then I could finally eliminate my handicap when it comes to drawing. The freehand drawing as we engineers like to call it, is a difficult art to master. Many of us have good ideas and imagination of how to draw. But, when it comes to translating those ideas into drawings, no matter how hard we try, something like this ends up on the paper:
Yeah, it’s not cool at all. The drawing skills aren’t something you can just acquire from a book. It takes years and years of practice to learn it. The best way pros use to teach novices is by guiding their hand movements with their own. There aren’t enough of those in the world, but what if a robotic device attached to your hand can guide you the same way? This is what Teacher robot intends to do.
An engineering student from Institute of Interaction Design, Denmark evolved this idea as part of his graduation thesis. At first, his product would teach a user how to play the different tunes of a piano. As a next step, he has upgraded the robot and named it Teacher. It can now impart the basic movements of fingers and hands to anyone born with a natural talent to do so. It forces your hands to follow the exact movements required to draw several times so that your mind can execute them later on by itself. Once you have done them with the aid of the Teacher, your muscle memory can easily remember the pattern of the movement and do it without external help.
It is the same process as a typing tutor does to us by making our fingers automatically jump to the right word. But since, drawing is not about punching letters on a board alone, it is necessary to guide the hand too. In this way, your drawing lines will become much better in a short span of time, and you can make excellent freehand illustrations or doodles all by yourself!
However, the Teacher is only a prototype as it doesn’t look as if it will reach the retail market anytime soon. Public interact with the robot didn’t go as expected, as people were extremely uncomfortable having their hands controlled by the robot’s feedback. They would resist the forced movement, and thus it didn’t work properly. The gadget needs someone like Steve Jobs, who can convert it into a product for other users. Till, then, we should not get our hopes up for it.
