First Fiducial Tests

My first test at school. The original script comes from Heinze Havinga (leftfoodmedia.nl) and is slightly modified because it didn't work for me. Orientation and positioning of the number boxes, for example, is an added feature.

Once I arrived home, I took this old glass plate from the shed, cleaned it up as much as it could be cleaned up (stuff from the garden was growing on it), and made a simple glass table out of it using two boxes.



There's a simple desk lamp (from IKEA, incase you would want to purchase this excellent and stylish monolith of a decoration) under there that lights everything up from the floor, and a webcam pointing straight up. Be sure to draw the field of view on the plate, saves you a lot of confusion. I put a mirror under there to reflect the light from the desk lamp up to the glass plate so it's fully brightened, but not over lighted. You can also put the desklamp up to shine the light -just- under the plate. Both ways worked pretty well for me, but went for the mirror reflection way (unless you'd love a constant light source burning your face).

So, eventually with a little help from the Heinze Havinga script I let the vvvv patch communicate with an AS3 script. It can trigger songs, play and stop them, pause and unpause them, pan and control the volume, all by using the fiducial markers.



- Robin (Cor / The Geek :/ )

Reach of Children: TU Delft

In order to get the best way of interaction, the dimensions of the device should be adapted to children as well. As our target group is 8 to 12 years old, we need to adapt to that. Therefor we found a great article online about human limits in reach, etc. This is based on Dutch children, but it's worthwhile to take a look at. Here is the link to DINED.

3D Models with Google Sketchup

For this project to succeed we need to start thinking about dimensions. Therefor I made initial 3D drafts using Google Sketchup. This, however, still needs a green light from our teacher. We're hoping we can start creating the MT as soon as possible!

First Concept: Touch&Blocks

Each MultiTouch device needs its own concept. After doing research and analysing everything we brainstormed a lot. We had many, many ideas which we had to reshape constantly. It was important to hit the core of graphic design, and it took a while!

Finally, in the last days we decided on a concept to use and reshape until it is just perfect. The basic concept is to have a newsfeed as theme. Each newsfeed has a message, to that message the children will have to create an image that fits: designing the message. Good examples can be found here.

The children will get their own easel (MT) and a box with blocks. The blocks are the items in their toolbox: Colouring, Text, Eraser, etc. They will have to put the blocks in a whole to active that tool. If they pick - for instance - the paint bucket, numerous paint splatters will float over the window, which they can drag and really leave a paint trail. I tried to explain it with an image, which you see below.

Analysing Graphic Design

Graphic Design is basically the same as puzzling: putting the pieces at the right place. There is one big difference. In a puzzle you decode to be able to see the picture; in graphic design you code pieces to transmit a message (construct the picture). As explained in the images below.

Kickoff

A few weeks back a group of 120 students, including me, got the task to create a haptic/natural interface. Graphic Design Museum Breda (located in The Netherlands) gave a briefing with their desires: Kids between 8 and 12 should be able to use it, and do that as natural as possible. Also given was the subject: It should tell the user something about graphic design.

The project started and all students were divided into groups of 5 persons, which we chose ourselves. The last 3-4 weeks and the next month I will be working with Tobias, Cor (also referred as The Geek), Bart and Toine. During the first week we researched and analysed our target group. Both field research and desk research.

Eventually we decided on the simplest concept we could possibly imagine: the basics of graphic design. Which is of course: transferring a message from one to another via graphics. This means the whole proces is: message -> encoding -> decoding (I will add sketches later on).

A pure form to this is the enigma machine used in World War II. Simple messages got scrambled and unscrambled. And what's a more simple and playful form than sliding a 8 or 15 puzzle?

However there still isn't much MT purpose to this setup. So now what? The fun part is that children create the puzzle. Once they solved the puzzle the kid can and hopefully will create the image/design/graphic/etc for the next passenger. Once they're done the pieces will be scrambled by the computer.

For now this is the basic concept we will be applying. More updates will follow in the next few days. Thank you for reading.

- Maarten