PROJECTOCTOPING
Octoping.
TU/e · Final Bachelor Project
September 2024 — January 2025
September 2024 — January 2025
OVERVIEW
Can emotions travel better through tentacles than texts?
Long-distance relationships are often defined by an emotional gap that text messages and video calls can never fully bridge. The absence of touch — a hand on the shoulder, an arm thrown across the bed — leaves a silence that words don’t fill.
Octoping is a pair of remotely connected octopus companions designed to help partners spontaneously reach out and playfully share how they feel, without needing words. When one is touched or manipulated, its counterpart on the other side of the world awakens and mirrors the gesture through string-actuated soft-robotic tentacles. Developed as my Final Bachelor Project at TU/e under Dr. ir. Joep Frens. Featured at 4TU Dutch Design Week 2025.
- Course
- Final Bachelor Project
- Institution
- TU/e · Industrial Design
- Supervisor
- Dr. ir. Joep Frens
- Type
- Individual project
- Duration
- ~20 weeks
- Finished
- January 2025
- Exhibition
- 4TU Dutch Design Week 2025
Significance
- Connected Devices
- Aesthetics of Interaction
- Soft Robotics
- IoT
- Psychology
- User Testing
- ESP32
- 3D Printing
- OOCSI
- Mechatronics
Manipulation
01INSIGHT
The thing missing wasn't more bandwidth.
FIELDWORK
I spoke with eight couples in long-distance relationships. The recurring theme wasn’t loneliness in the abstract — it was the loss of incidentaltouch. The hand on the shoulder. The arm thrown across the bed. The signals that don’t need a sentence.
REFRAME
Designing another chat affordance felt like a non-answer. The right intervention had to be physical, ambient, and held in the hand — not opened on a screen. The octopus form gave me a creature that invites touch by shape alone, with enough articulation to mirror a gesture without trying to imitate the human body.
02EXPRESSIONS
Four moods, one body.
Tentacle mechanism — exploration
03MECHANISM
String-actuated tentacles, ESP32 brain.
TENTACLES
Each of the eight tentacles is a flexible inner tube wrapped in a fabric skin, threaded with three nylon control lines. Pulling one line curls the tentacle in that direction; releasing all three returns it to neutral via passive spring-back. The whole hand-feel is intentionally soft, warm, and a little bit alive.
BOND
An ESP32 in each companion publishes its touch and tentacle state to OOCSI (TU/e’s open IoT broker). The paired companion subscribes and replays the gesture with a tiny natural delay — enough for both sides to feel the exchange, not enough to feel laggy.
04USER TESTING
