Playing with sound

Labsession today was fun! We played with sound… Well we played with a thing called Pure Data. A pretty basic piece of software that can detect input and through a visual interface you are able to alter the input into output you want. It has pretty advanced logic and you can have different kind of outputs, like playing sound, what’s even more fun is the fact that the thing can detect yourArduino board if it’s hooked up through a USB cable.

Now we did basic stuff we took a LDR (Light Dependent Resistor) and read out the current, the current was a factor to make the pitch of a sound signal. Even more fun it was when we hooked up a second LDR, that one we used to control the control the volume of the setup. Soon we were making music by waving our hands over the breadboard.

Pfhew a long time, but my project is here anyway

Yeah, I don’t know why but I haven’t updated as much as I would like. Anyway lot’s of things happened naturally in the mean time. We had to give in our proposition of the artefact we want to make for Physical Computing.

There were several good ones, but still the most of them were not dirty at all. Our concept was pretty well structured but also we got the feedback of killing our darling. And so we did actually. We started with a brand new concept. (The first one was about lights and how they were going to light up when people moved closer together.)

Our new and improved concept we want to explore if it’s possible to make a painting that is totally made with the aid of the visitors of the painting. From next week on we are planning on making mock-up versions to seek out what the best way is to lure people in the interaction with the painting.

The most valuable tip we got of Erik is that we need to be sure that we find the right balance between interaction. We need to find out where the line is when people are aware of the change in the painting by their movement and the line where people really need to do an effort to change something in the painting.

As a last we want also that people in front of the painting are interacting so we are going to find out how we are going do that and find out what the appropriate award has to be.

Peace out and I update more regularly that is a promise ;)

Start the research

Well that would be a lie. It already started last week, but this week I got my research topic and the opportunity to get to know the people I’ll be doing this research with. So it’s actually only from today that we can start to work.

My research topic that I chose was game modding. Mikael the guy that will supervise our research talked a little bit with our group and asked our experience in the field. We soon ended up with the problems that modders have to “sell” their mod to the public. Immediate questions that we asked ourselves was what makes a mod popular, where do people hook of in the development of the mod and the such.

We are not going to lay the focus on the contents of the mod be it game experience, sound, graphic design,… We are going to look if modders make mistakes in thinking how their community reacts to certain aspects, or just think that they know their community while they actually don't know anything of it. Even going deeper in trying to find new ways for modders in communicating with their audience.

In a way this is all very related to what I do in Belgium in my courses communication and multimediadesign. It’s almost the same concept as a project (case 2.4. wondercall) that we did, the only difference is that we know have to make a real study and make a general overview how modders can brand their mod.

Some fast research I made, didn’t reveal much yet about the topic we chose. I only found some small tutorials explaining some aspects of the communication between modders and their community:

• Your mod’s website
• Getting the first impression right
• Setting up your mod’s site
• PR do's and don'ts

All of them are from moddb. Their are several other sites like moddb, but those I still have to browse through.

Words we are going to use offten or can help us:

• community: community building, understanding the market, knowing the market
  
• PR: media releases, sticking to concepts
• branding: marketing, mod branding (our new term of the research propably), internet marketing
• Site: interactivity, user input, updating, two way communication
• ...

The problem situation is already typed out and I'm going to post it as soon as I can. All People that can help us on the subject are offcourse invited to drop in a line in the comments!

PC 2 Essay

The Energizer Suit is an installation made for people who suffer from seasonal affecting disorder to give them the daily sun energy they want. If you spent your time inside the cocoon of the construction it emits artificial sunlight onto you so you can boost yourself up for the day.

The same object was shown in one of Erik’s classes (Social Technologies). He than described it as one of the newer versions of the “bubble design” concepts. He meant by that it used to be fashion to make installations that let yourself as human be alone and excluded from the world. Like the floating devices and the inflatable cocoons for in airports and such.

The Energizer Suit isn’t really technical in the way that there is a complex interface (be it visible or invisible) operated by a human. What offcourse makes us ask if this thing is closely related to Physical Computing and/or Interaction Design. Well this is a thing that I can’t really give a clear answer to either. I think it’s something that can be “tagged” as Physical Computing for certain. And even more if you think about the PC2 theme of this year: Personal Technologies.

The suit is namely a technology for a person, that gives the person an advantage of using it. The advantage is indeed not a functional advantage for the body but it’s a personal innerself advantage.

A topic I like to discuss in the group on Thursday is the question if something that can be tagged with Physical Computing if it’s automatically tagged with Interaction Design. Because I can’t really place this Energizer Suit somewhere in the story Simon told the first graders in his introduction to what Interaction Design is. I am just concerned about this as a non full-time Interaction Designer and it’s hard for me to sometimes label things as IDK or not.

The actual reason I choose this article is because one of my text that I had to read. I had to read Cabinet thoroughly. Cabinet is actually a quarterly of art and culture, a magazine be it so. We had to read two articles of it: “The Clinical Orgasm” by Rachel P. Maines and “Appliance Theory” by Jennifer Gabrys.

And the first one is very similar to the Energizer Suit. The Clinical Orgasm is a text stating how the vibrator is one of the first common electrical devices in America. This text was written to ban the laws in some states that make it illegal to buy sex toys or owning more than five.

The text actually states how the vibrator was introduced as a clinical thing to help woman get orgasms. And how it was really recommended for them to get a normal sex life if they were diagnosed with the now already abolished term: hysteria. So a vibrator actually originates from the idea of helping people with problems in their sex life. If they were diagnosed with hysteria, the doctors of those day recommended to stimulate the genitalia expressively during love play. A bit in a way how doctors of today have to diagnose a thing called winter blues. Mostly doctors nowadays give them energy pills or a shot. In a way they could subscribe them some sessions in the Energizer Suit.

Lovely to actually conclude that the vibrator actually could be on of the first personal technologies artifact!

Like the kids play, we work

Yeah, today I had this feeling. Lovely actually! First lesson was a bit boring about social technologies. It was given by Erik and it was about that humans are social beings and that we in our project should try to work this in, in our project.

But OK, the lecture of Björn was one of the most fun ones that I had, because it gave the most answers to the questions I had like: "how the hell do we shape our artefact?". It wasn’t really a lecture (like most of the lectures here), it was dmore a rundown of how to shape your projects to full and working products and how you are able in the design proces to fake and test with non working prototypes. The lecture was conveniently cold: “From cardboard to real life”.

He gave us some hints and tips about how to fake things and ideas just for showing to a jury or some kind. Told us about different kind of materials their pros and cons. He showed lot’s of his cardboard mock-ups together with some of his final products. You really had the feeling that anything “goes” as long as it purposes it function. Actually a bit like we used to be kids and play with a carton box, the one day it was a car, the other day it was a boat in which we sailed the seven seas.

Touching sensors

Recently got a session with David about sensors. Not that big deal all my electronics knowledge got freshened up. Some new concepts of sensors, but in a way they are all related to each other. I loved the fact that he isn’t afraid of new technologies and just gave us examples of the latest technologies like touch screens and even multi-touch screens. According to David you even can control them with you Arduino board. And if somebody knows if something is possible on an Arduino board, it must be the mad guy himself ;)

He gave us a movie about what is possible with multi-touch screen with the promising words: "be ready to start crying!"

Now, just for the readers of my blog here, here are some other movies so I would say: keep on crying: (links ordered from boring to cool ;))

• Interactive Touchless Table in Tokyo (So indeed this one works only with a camera or something, no)
• Multi-touch Screen (almost like in Minority Report)
  
• Multi User Warcraft III and Google Earth on a Table (like in title: even works with more users, certainly watch the Warcraft part)
• MinorityXP - the Minority Report interface (offcourse a real Minority Report look-a-like)
• Innotive Demo (A company apparently already creating projects like above)
  
• iBar - largest multitouch touchscreen (who doesn't want a cocktail in this bar?)
• Microft preview: Play Anywhere (First real cool thing I've seen from Microsoft, and it blew me away! A must see)
  

As you see, most of them are realy cool, but the coolness mostly depends on what you do with it. The hardware is new, which makes it for us designers an oppertunity to create new and dazling things with it. This is what I like about interaction design (compared to c-md than), jumping on new technologies and just see what we can do with them, and even challenging the industry for new and better hardware/systems so we can make what the people want!

We also did a lab session with the theory, more specific on capacitive sensors. They are able to detect pressure because of change in the capacitive field. If mounted good and with sensitive capacitators they even are able to detect pressure/motion through wood. What makes it cool offcourse resulting in that you can use paper, carton, plastic, wood,... as any kind of surface to work with to make your project (as long as it isn't metallic or it should work if you isolate it from the rest). The same technology is used for the iPods for example. Steven from Australia even made one with carton.

Tea party of the year

For some kind of a reason I always end up thinking: "How do I explain at home what I’m doing in school". Yeah we had a tea party… Why oh why do you have tea parties in school? Well simple, each one of our groups had to get one specific ingredient for the party and return with some good stories to tell how we got the item while we were having our coffee/tea. (Actually, I had hot coco, if you ask me)

While going after our thing (we had to go for a newspaper) we had to make a "story telling amplifier”, to make a more interesting story. We made some gloves so I didn’t had opposable thumbs anymore.

So here goes my story: I was walking into the kiosk and was looking at several of the magazines. The magazines were tightly packed in their stands and that was a problem, I had to really squeeze them out with the palms of my hand. After a while I went for the newspaper. I asked a guy if he could give me a newspaper. I don’t know if it was the professionalism of my “bandages” or my acting skills, he really believed that I was in a desperate need of help. The guy asked me immediately if he could give me further assistance. I tried to lure him in buying the paper with me because I only needed that section of the newspaper, but than he got the big picture that he was in some kind of joke.

At the register the lady was quite amazed to see me go grabbing for money a full ten seconds in my pockets and was trying to figure out what I was doing down there. Than the most fun was when I didn’t realize that I was going to get money back. There I was what should I do… I reacted immediately by showing my palm and she just put the money in my palm unfortunately that was a bad choice for me. I couldn’t reach the money anymore.

All in all not such a big story, from the other groups neither. But afterwards a descent discussion about what stories are, and where we have to place them in a designing process, and more specific in a interaction designer profile. Stories are about obstacles, and how you conquer them.
All in all a bit a repetition of what I got from script writing but Erik (our teacher) made a good point: “I think: a story becomes interesting when there are fun and challenging obstacles, but as a designer you try to avoid them. However as an interaction designer there is the branch of game development where you just want to have rules and obstacles, those rules and obstacles can only be convincingly told by a story. So it always depends and as a designer you should think about the obstacles that you invention may have. And those obstacles are what make it so much fun some times.”

As a last note, I now see fully where the guys of unsworn, who also gave the lecture, are going with their concepts of digital peacock tails.

Do you know anything about Arduino stuff?

No, actually not. Yeah the most promising start, a teacher looking worried at you because you are new and you don’t know anything about Arduino. Wel not that it matters now because I have learned myself the basics in no time and started working with the DMX extension. It’s really cool actually. As already mentioned the DMX is a communications protocol mostly used to control stage lighting.

We got ourselves the necessary gear to create some small projects. The gear we used was a DMX extension plate that could be mounted onto the Arduino board. A small “slave” capable of decoding the DMX signal and sending out 8 of the 512 channels at a time. (The slave had jumpers to select the 8 channels you wanted as output).

So the first assignments was reliably easy, we got example code and had to run it on the board, make some adjustments and test it again. All easy if you had the hang of the DMX system. We developed the assignments further with loops creating patterns (woh if that isn't Semcity like, a project from during the ACD classes) and with a piezo element. The piezo element we used to recreate the famous Knight Rider. Every time the Piezo element got “stressed” (with good ones it could work with voice vibrations) the light moved up one signal. We extended it by making it fade out and fade in when the lights changed.

It took us a while but we found out by "hard" learning that all our calculations stressed out our bitrate. So it became unreadable for the slave element steering the LEDs. So we had to rewrite our code a bit making first the calculations, storing them in an array and than reading out the array in a direct loop towards the creation of a proper sequenced bitrate signal.

Today with only the Arduino board here in my dorm I have created some small code that creates a random Christmas light sequence. If that isn't cool!

Pictures coming online very soon!

No way, PC2 has started

Yep it's there PC2 started. PC2 wasn't actually on my lists of courses back in Belgium, but when I found out we could change some subjects to a somewhat higher level, I took the opportunity. PC2 gave me a real good challenge of working with electronics and arduino boards what really brings me into the situation of working out some prototypes into the real world and not on the conceptual level in the way of a presentation on screen.

On monday we had our first lecture with an introduction explaining us the "theme" we are going to work with. Later on they gave an introduction into DMX. DMX can be seen as a "language" to steer lots of different things with only one signal. It can do that with the use of bitfrequenties over the line. In total it can steer 512 "channels" and is mostly used in lighting environments. One thing that I was surprised they didn't mention and I found out on wikipedia is that you can't use it when life situations are at roll because it's doesn't give controll feedback. An important side note if you ask me.

So this afternoon is going to be the first work for me on an Arduino board we see what it gives :)