Volti
Volti is a hands-free sheet music page turner that allows musicians to play without interruption.
Volti was created by my team, Pink team, in MIT’s 2.009 - The Product Engineering Process. 2.009 took us through the design process over the course of the semester, starting with product brainstorming and going all the way to alpha prototype. In addition to the technical experience offered by the class, we covered a variety of equally important topics required to make the product succeed including: user needs interviewing and identification; material selection; intuitive user interface design; and business model creation.
For more marketing information, see Volti’s online brochure.
My Role
In order to move quickly and cover all aspects of the product design process in three short months, we formed small sub-teams: the exterior housing team; the page turning team; the page adhesion team; and the business development team.
As a member of the exteriour housing sub-team, my contributions included:
- CAD and design work for the exterior housing and foot pedal.
- Fabrication of components (water jetting and 3D printing) for those sub-assemblies in the exterior housing and foot pedal.
- Implementing and managing our team’s CAD version control system. This was crucial to our success as our team of 17 engineers rapidly iterated on a hardware product with many moving and interacting parts. All 17 of us were able to work on the top-level assembly at once without version conflicts.
The Evolution of the Product
As the exteriour housing sub-team, it was our job to make sure Volti was beautiful enough to share the stage with a Steinway piano. In order to accomplish that task, we used an ebony exterior housing for the Alpha prototype and brass inlays to match the brass on a Steinway. Even the foot pedal’s brass top is inspired by the brass foot pedals seen on many pianos. Below you’ll see all the iterations that we produced on the road to the final presentation’s ebony Alpha prototype.
