iVibe, uVibe, weVibe
Have you ever wanted to pleasure yourself on the go? The iVibe is a vibrator that connects directly to your phone, so that you can stay productive - who says self care has to be separated from responding to work emails? with iVibe, you can send your boss that file they've been asking for all day WHILE pleasuring yourself! Or, you can use the comfortable 45 degree bend to watch an erotic video to get yourself going. Let's vibe together!
By Eden Chinn, Rebecca Melman, Philip Cadoux
Here you will see the working prototype for iVibe, the phone powered vibrator.
For us, the first thing we had to do was decide on a shape. We spent a while looking at other existing mechanisms and evaluating the shapes on 3 main criteria: feasibility, comfort, and formfactor as it relates to a phone add on.
Eventually, we decided on a finger-like shape that would fit into small pockets and other low-storage-capacity spaces.
We also had to think about the orientation of the vibrator. While many video streaming apps are used in the landscape position, we felt that the full functionality of the phone is better accessed in a portrait orientation
Furthermore, we wanted to be as true to the sex-toy form as we could get. Because of that, we decided on silicone casting as the main material for this piece. None of us had done it before, but understood that we would need to create a mold for the silicone. Since design and production were going to take time, we decided to get started on 3D immediately.
The first challenge was using Fusion360 for an organic shape. Generally, the workflow we are used to would be sculpting it in Maya or something like zBrush, but were out of practice with those. Additionally, we thought having schematic drawings would be nice, so we got to work.
In fusion, we used the mesh modeling tool to work on this. By starting with a cylinder and pushing and pulling the vertices, we were able to create a well known shape for our vibrator. This gave us a lot of flexibility in testing as well since we could scale it up and down as a percentage while testing our cast sizes.
Original (Right)
Dowel Pin adjustment (Above)
After this, we used a simple "cut" command to create a cast that we could pour the silicone into. Our first iteration included 4 pegs that would be sanded down and fit together, then easily pull apart. This was perfect for our first cast, but eventually we needed to refine it by using 4 metal dowel rods to keep it together. Since we would be 3D printing things, we needed to be able to easily sand down the faces that push together. As such, we adjusted the cast after our initial testing.
After this, we realized that the circuit was going to need something to protect where it connects to the phone. This meant that we had to create something that could be cast into the mold at the same time as the circuit (spoiler: this failed), it needed to fit around a phone edge, and the lightning connector had to get through.