2012-10-23

Mingle 2.0

Upplagd av Víctor Guerrero



Mingle 2.0: the interactive beer coaster its a prototype that tries to overhaul the classic concept of mingle using technology available to improve it. First of all, a mingle is an informal (usually with drinks) meeting of people with the purpose to know new people as well as making new contacts either professional or of other kinds. In these basis, we wanted to help people stablish conversations with new people. 

How? 

Using the glass we have developed. This glass has a light that shows information to help the mingler. This information is based upon 3 steps: 

  1. ice breaking phase: mingler is walking around and the glass gives information about the connections he or she has with the poeple around him/her. The information is shown with the color: the red it is your glass the less you have in common with people around you and green is used for high connections. This information can depend based on the purpose of the mingle. It could either use information from linkedin if it's a professional one or from facebook and other social networks if it has another purpose. To get this information, the mingler previously registers to our webpage where his personal information is specified (links to social networks, etc.). 
  2. shared information phase: by cheering up the glass with another mingler you can have extra information about your particular connection with that person. This information is given by blinks: the faster it blinks the more you have in common and the other way around. 
  3. connecting phase: after cheering the glasses and staying close, they start to interact together to give an extra feeling of connection between the people in the group. This interaction consists in the change of colors of the glasses: first one changes to one color and gradually and one by one all the other glasses of the group change to that color until the first one is reached again. Then it changes its color and the same procedure is repeated. The colors shown in this step range between green to blue. This is to avoid and differenciate it from the first step. 

obs: it can be a good experience knowing people that you don't have any connection with. This can open new unexpected connections. 

Technical description: 

Using sunspot's radio signal strength we can measure distance between devices and use that information to update the behaviour of sunspots in each glass. The initial approach used a server to receive all the information of the sunspots but when it was demonstrated the sunspot that was used as a proxy to have internet connection stop working after a while. For this implementation built-in information in the sunspots was used so the evaluation of the connections is precomputed in the sunspots to avoid the internet connection. 

Authors: 

 Daniel Nyberg, Sandra Hindskog, Sara Sandgärde, Víctor Guerrero

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2012-10-17

The Chameleon Chair

Upplagd av Ryan McLeod

Chameleon Chair from Ryan on Vimeo.

The chameleon chair is a prototype created at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden for a physical interaction design class. This video demonstrates the chair's ability to match the color of the sitter's clothing and fade in the longer they stay seated. When the sitter leaves the chair slowly fades out their color to represent their past presence. (At the time this video was made, not everything was fully working so this video is just a demonstration of how it should work and not how it currently does. In it's final form the chair would fade in and out much more slowly than shown in the video.)

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2012-10-10

Digits

Upplagd av Víctor Guerrero


Digits by Microsoft Research is a new technology that Microsoft has presented in the UIST 2012  (the 25th Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology). Basically is a device with IR sensors and accelerometers that can read your hand gestures. It seems to be like a portable and more basic version of the Kinect. This doesn't mean to be less "expressive" in terms of interaction because the exmaples presented on the video look like more useful than the ones been able to do with a Kinect.

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2012-10-07

Woven, E-wearable (game) platform

Upplagd av Víctor Guerrero


Woven by Patrick Kersten and Christiaan Ribbens is the project of two students of Interaction Design at Utrecht School of Arts and consists in a shirt that provides different features such as: speakers, bluetooth, 12x12 RGB led piel screen, bend sensors, heart rate sensor, shake motor. This is driven by some arduino Lilypads as well as through a smartphone which comunicate with all this devices. 

What they wanted to achieve was to create a platform to help game designers build new game experiencies with new hardware that provides a more human appealing interaction. What I liked of the project is the fact that they opened they work to other people so everyone can benefit from the hardware they have built. This is why they call it platform instead of just something specific for making one game. The same happened with the interactive cubes from the MIT media lab and helped other people to focus in the interaction itself rather than trying to reivent the wheel again when what you need is already done by another. 

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Cubesat

Upplagd av NielsHamelink

What if the sky could talk to us? The arduino based Cubesat can help achieve this. This platform is meant to make space exploration affordable to everyone and allow for experiments in space. But how does it help the sky talk to us? Well, recently a group of solar-powered Japanese cubesats with high-powered LEDs left the ISS space station. The FITSAT-1 was one of these and it spread the morse message "Hi this is Niwaka Japan".



While professor Takushi Tanaka argues that this idea may not seem directly useful. It may be interesting to communicate government messages (e.g. in case of disaster). The chain of satelites will be visible outside of Japan as well. Want to know more? See see these pages.

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2012-10-06

Tape recorders

Upplagd av Víctor Guerrero


Tape recorders by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is an installation where rows of tapes measure how long do the visitors stay in front of them. While a person stays in front of some of them, a motor in each of the tapes pulls it off so the longer they stay the longer the tape will be translating time into space.

At the beginning I thought the installation wanted to remark the reminiscence of people as the other course group did, but the authors' point is different because when the tapes reach 3 meters they crash and fall. A variation of the same installation could have been done so if no people are detected make the motor work the other way around to put in the tape giving this sense of reminiscence.


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Still life

Upplagd av Víctor Guerrero


Still life by Scott Garner is an interactive paint that allows the spectators to play with its elements. With the help of motion sensors, tilting of the frame is detected and then sent to the software to simulate gravity. 

They have used phidgets and a PC running Unity3D which is a game engine that provides physics and is really artist friendly.  

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2012-10-03

Murata Walking Measurement System

Upplagd av NielsHamelink

While browsing Engadget I found an interesting system by Murata, a Japanese company. The system consists of a piezoelelectronic sensor in the shoe that, through Bluetooth 4.0, communicates with a smartphone. Although Engadget argued it to be merely a concept it does offer interesting  possibilities for interaction. The system can give feedback to dancers or runners but the installation can also be used to control/adapt/make music. The latter was one of the ideas discussed in class.




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2012-10-02

From SF MOMA: Exploded Views

Upplagd av cristi




From the ground floor they look like randomly placed LEDs. But from the first floor, nice moving shadows appear.











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2012-10-01

Super Angry Birds - A tangible controller

Upplagd av Víctor Guerrero



Super Angry Birds  by Hideaki Matsui and Andrew Spitz is a force feedback USB controller done as a project for a Haptics course for the game Angry Birds which tries to bring a tangible and more human appealing way of playing this game. You can rotate it to have different angles and pull the bird to throw it. To build it they have used Arduino and to simulate the resistance of the slingshot they hacked one of the motorized faders that can be found in sound mixing tables.


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