Physical interaction design DH2400

If you haven't seen it yet, our ever so productive friends at MIT Media Labs have a really cool interaction project in development:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_merrill_demos_siftables_the_smart_blocks.html

I would also like to recommend the other talks at TED, the site is full of inspiring talks about everything from physical interaction and design to physics, biology, education and much much more. A good source for inspiration!

I think this could be interesting for the "music_with_random_objects" group:
http://mlab.taik.fi/~korayt/emipro.html
(a project with Arduinos called "Experimental Musical Instruments")

Nu kickar vi igång arbetet. här är lite bilder på skisser.

http://plusea.at/index.php
Here is a very interesting blog from Hannah Perner-Wilson, with a great DIY section. With almost only conductive thread and neoprene she teaches you how to create your own bend sensors, pressure sensors, simple buttons and so on.

There is a lot of videos and explanations, and all her code is available for free (even the Processing applications she uses to demonstrate her sensors).


A picture of a home made bend sensor:



A video of simple fabric buttons:

Here is a video I showed to the "make_music_with_random_objetcs_of_the_everyday_life" group. Very simple (except it needs to be plugged to real electricity) but still fun.


BoxBeat from Karl D.D. Willis on Vimeo.

Open house of an interesting centre of excellence, registration to 23 feb.

I played around yesterday night with sunspots for the first time.

Some experiences:

* Sunspot manager is a good tool for making things simpler, eg upgrade the physical sunspots, tutorials, docs etc
* Netbeans plugins makes the work simple cause it gives use the option "build and deploy on sunspot"
* Dont forget to setup some permissions in the shell (if you're using mac):

sudo mkdir /var/lock
sudo chgrp uucp /var/lock
sudo chmod 775 /var/lock
sudo niutil -appendprop / /groups/uucp users

I missed this step and my Sunspot Apps only gave me weird error messages. The last row seem to be different in OSX 10.5

A funny idea from this Australian, Kyle Downes. No phidgets inside, but 4 big buttons and a D-pad that made me think about our projects. Here are some pictures about the wood structure and the 'A' & 'B' buttons, and a video of the final result.

Take a look at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/10/BAF214L2I2.DTL to see what students at Berkeley are doing in a similar course as ours.

[better video]
There seems to be a LivingSurface application in Täby Centrum!

My kids played with this for almost two hours yesterday. It seems to be quite a simple installation, based on an overhead video projector sending pictures to a white mat (on which kids run) and a video camera, most probably running a multi-touch table software, to detect the various moving spots (aka kids). It reacts more to kids who have darker clothes. There are some soft toys at one side, unrelated to the projection but giving a nice "play" and "kids" context.


[better video]

There are several scenes (balloons, flowers, water) and some of them are better designed, in that kids realize faster that the they are interactive. In one scene there are some butterflies that run away from the kids, but these are somewhat too small to notice. The water scene makes waves when kids "kick" the water, which are nice and probably challenging to do from a computer graphics standpoint, but not easy to notice when you're running around (still fun to play with once noticed). The balloons and flowers work best, as kids see them rushing away as they run around.



This looks like a commercial installation, quite reliable. It became a bit less reactive as the closing hour was approaching, not sure whether that was on purpose or it became de-calibrated. A great installation all in all, kids clearly enjoyed it.

I just want to give everyone a tip about the course site for Microcomputers in products; www.md.kth.se/mip. Here you can find lots of useful links, crash courses and info about detectors, motors, robots and so on. Enjoy!