builder is refering to the white stuff on the bottom-most layer. I just cut a small square out of my PS2 mat (~1.5 years old). There are four layers in the mat, and the bottom one is a white ‘rubber’ (looks the same as other mats I’ve used before, so it’s probably the same on most mats).
There is from bottom to top: the white textured material, a very thin foam pad, then a clear plastic, and then the top surface (I cut a 2x2 square out of the corner, so there was no part of the switches in this swatch).
The foam is useless (both for DDR, and for use as a compliant surface), the clear surface is too hard to be compliant, and I didn’t try the top materal. However, the white ‘rubber’ really works great. It’s got different texture on each side, and one orientation works much better than the other (rubbery surface down, fabricky surface up).
It feels slightly better under the finger than bare acrylic, gives equally good touches under static pressure as regular acrylic, but sliding touches work *much* better than acrylic. It seems to be mostly transparent to IR (dims ambient IR light slightly). No idea how well it works when projecting onto it, but it’s useless for me since it’s nearly opaque (well, diffuse) :(
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Other materials I’ve tried today:
Clear cling wrap:
~ Compliant, feels no better than acrylic (less sticking than bare acrylic, but still very meh).
+ Sliding touch is very slightly better, no change to static touch.
- It’s clingy and hard to get flat on acrylic, tears real easy.
Some plasticky paper (it’s not mylar, but I haven’t been able to find my sheets of mylar anywhere)
Great diffuser, not compliant.
From what I remember of the mylar sheets, they are fantastic diffusers (which is why I was using them), but I don’t think they’re very compliant, at least not the ones I had.
Something called a ‘leading blank’ (Gallery Glass Leading Blanks), which seems to be some material for making fake (or real) stained glass on top of. Got them at a craft store, and they appear to be a reasonably thin sheet of styrene or something similar.
- Not compliant either
+ Has a great finger feel (top and bottom have different textures, one smoother than the other)
+ Diffuses well
Most every other type of plastic I had lying around the house. Nothing worked well enough to note, either as a decent diffuser if you need one, or as a compliant surface.
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Does anyone know of a clear or nearly-clear compliant surface that doesn’t diffuse much?
