Exhibition Day

Exhibition Day itself was great, while some of our team members were stressing out and looking to make final changes to the code I was feeling good. Potentially due to the lack of sleep and large amounts of caffeine I had consumed, but once our blackout curtains were up I was itching to show our project to people and see what all the other groups had done. We were one of the lucky groups that got marked early in the day so the pressure was off for most of the exhibition and we could just enjoy it.

Our installation itself worked about as well as we could have hoped. The hand tracking was not perfect and the Leap motion would often drop out, but despite that the marking team had a flawless interaction during the marking and people seemed to genuinely enjoy our concept. I was surprised by the amount of time people were spending engaging with our installation given that the interaction was a little clunky and our intractable game objects could be hard to hit. Maybe it was because of the large amounts of sweets we had at our table with gummy bears, Cadbury favourites, and Reese's pieces (The king of chocolates) we were clearly a destination with other teams (sign play) sending people our way to preserve their own meager candy stashes.

On a more seriously note I was really happy with the level of interest and engagement people came away with after playing with our exhibit. Throughout the semester I always felt that we had a strong concept and an interesting proposition, so it was nice to hear people commenting on that. It really allowed people an imagine what the future could hold type moment, where the actual installation and its functionality was less important than the interaction itself and what interactive body projection could become as a story telling method. While I think our concept may have been one of the best my choice for best installation would have to go to Taleweavers that Dome set up along with the switches and levers they created really worked a charm.

Then it was time to share a drink with friends and pack everything down like it never happened. It was great to see everyone working together and people staying around to socialise. The after drinks down at the Charming Squire was a nice way to get to know everyone that we had been reporting back to every Friday for the last 10 or so weeks. With that said this will be the end of my blog for this semester Lena can sit atop the iron blog throne with a mighty 25 posts. Big shout out to the say hello team for turning blogging into a competition and keeping everyone on track.

Mad Dash to the Finish Line

It already feels like forever ago that the team was madly pushing over Saturday and Sunday to get the project polished up and the functionality finalised in order to exhibit to the public on Tuesday. Saturday we finished implementing the last of our functionality and got the system somewhat stable so that we could test it on Sunday. Sundays testing revealed that we desperately needed to change the way our leap motion was being mounted.

While mounting the leap top down made logical sense, when testing with two people it was unable to detect more than one hand at a time. Major panic aside, we were lucky enough that Team sign play were also putting in the hard yards on their project so we were able to test their side mounted leap set up. While the tracking for an individual hand was slightly worse than with the top down method, this side mounted cradle system seemed perfectly happy to track two hands at one.

So I madly got to work copying their design and creating a cradle of our own that we could use at the exhibition to hold our leap controller. The rest of the day contain large amounts of sawdust, sanding and sweeping as we got the new cradle built and tested before heading home for the night to paint it up.

Fast forward to Monday the day before the exhibition we were in the lucky situation that our installation was relatively simple in terms of build and was easily packed into a single box making transport much easier than some of the other groups. Still between the moving van being delayed an helping other teams disassemble it was not until lunch time we had actually unloaded at the  edge ready to set up. Surprisingly all the bays at the edge were still set up to the public and needed to be cleared to make way for peoples installations, which we were advised was not happening until 2pm that afternoon. Cleared bays at 2pm and lock out at 4pm did not sit well with me so with a little help from Michael from team 'say hello' and some negotiations with edge staff we cleared the bays out ourselves.

Come the end of the day our installation was 70% set up and ready to go for Monday we just needed to purchase some black out curtains to darken the space and ensure our leap motion would track hands nicely. We organised for team members to make a run to the city on Tuesday for anything we were missing (damn you bluetac) while others would stay behind and set up the camera and posters in time for the 12am open to the public.

Week 12: Sound the Battle Music

Blow the horn of Gondor, send for the elves, cry for the ents, SOMEONE get the eagles. Time for all hands on deck with the throttle turned up to 12, it's the final countdown.

With exactly seven days until exhibition time it is time to polish like crazy until our little baby shines real nice. Today we are getting more footage around GOMA and the edge for our video so we do not have to use any stock footage and avoid any frame sizing issues. Additionally we are getting our projector stand and leap motion cradle painted black to fit in with the rest of our exhibition space and ensure our project looks a little more professional, rather than cobbled together.

Additionally we need to clean up our unity scene and add some extra components and interactivity to make the experience a little less one dimensional and better get across our concept. Thankfully yesterday Ken raided the asset store and found some beautiful free low poly assets which we can use to make our scene look a lot more inviting with minimal effort. Using some of these assets we are also planning to improve the currently limited scope of our interaction by having trees that will drop apples onto the ground which can then be fed to our roaming horses.  Additionally we found some low poly flowers which we can use to sprout on users hands when they leave their hand stationary for a certain amount of time.

Hopefully we are not leaving ourselves with too much to do at the end, but it would really be great if we could get all this extra interactivity working for the exhibit. I feel like there are going to be a lot of late nights and hopefully slightly crazed (safe) dance parties in the workshop this week. Also fingers crossed I am not a complete mess after getting all four of my wisdom teeth out tomorrow :O

Week 11 - Video Time.

So today we had a fun session watching all of the groups videos on the big screen and getting feedback from the group as a whole. I was pleasantly surprised to see that a lot of the videos were still very rough with some having simple placeholders along with audio and frame issues. Not in the sense that I do not want the other groups to have a better video than ours but I knew that our video still needed a lot more polish to be ready for the exhibition.

Most of the feedback from the tutors and the other groups were things that I had already picked up after watching through our video a few times but it was good to be able to clarify the areas we should focus on improving. I think the better part of the experience was being able to see all the different approached that the groups took in making their videos. Some used a lot of interview style pieces with product shots while others created a story with cute wizard of Oz style animations. Being able to give other groups feedback on their video (after Steven of course) was good, but I am not sure how much time each group will have to implement changes given that the exhibition is next week and the prototype is arguably a lot more important to polish.

Either way the general feedback on our video was that it was too heavily scripted and sounded a little too much like an infomercial. So we will need to cut down on the superlatives and let the product shots do more of the talking for us in explaining our concept. We also need to provide a better frame for the problem and explain WHY we are actually doing this to better sell the idea and usefulness of the project to people. Then another common theme throughout the presentations was the lack of product shots with users interacting, which we will be able to fix up after the exhibition where we can gather extra footage. We will need to ensure we have a good plan to get this footage during the chaos of the exhibition maybe setting up two cameras, one stationary to do a time lapse and one to capture more intimate moments and close ups with users.

Regardless there is still a lot to get done next week!!!

Week 11 - Special K.

Midweek update, things are looking up ^.^

Thanks to some help from Kit AKA the mystery tutor during Tuesday session helping me to set up our camera and leap motion alignment we now have a system of how to set up our Unity scene to get decent alignment and tracking of hands. The mapping is still not perfect but it is pretty close with the hands roughly the right size and staying mostly on top of users hands during our initial testing sessions. However, we will still need to do some work in figuring out how the leap motion detect where hands are coming from as it has a tendency to flip orientation arbitrarily causing the hand to come in on the opposite side to the user.

Ken and I will look to polish up the tracking and other aspects of the horse animation to make the interact cleaner, as it is currently quite clunky and does not really represent the overall concept we were hoping to go for. Again in hindsight it would have paid huge dividends for our project it we could have had access to a Leap Motion controller earlier in the project, which is probably more our fault than anything else. We should still be able to provide a solid proof of concept prototype for the exhibition though it may be lacking the polish I would have liked.

In Video news we now have all our shots and plenty of footage to work with in time for Fridays presentation and submission. Shilpi has taken the lead on the video front and will produce something amazing no doubt. We will definitely need a solid explainer video and supporting materials as I feel that our current prototype represents only a slither of what we hoped to achieve at the outset of this project. Hopefully that will be enough to spark the interest of people at the exhibition and do the concept justice.

The Week Ahead.

Crunch time is well and truly upon us Video due Friday and only two weeks until the final delivery of the project. Ken managed to merge the Unity code base on Monday so now the horse moves around naturally and gets attached to hands, where as previously we had those two working in separation. If we can keep developing separate functionality like this and then integrating without major issues we should be on track to have a solid project by the end of the semester. Additionally Ken managed to get the horses changing hands from one to the other and dropping off the hand if it leaves the scene rather than the horse also disappearing.

This should hopefully be sufficient for us to test today as we now have a free projector given that the exhibition at the State Library has been disassembled (THANKS PETE ^.^). We did have to make some slight modifications to our physical build as this new projector had a slightly different throw and mounting system but we have that up and running now ready to test. The only issue we might have is that we need a Leap to conduct proper testing but that means that we cannot be using it to work on the code at the same time. Hopefully we can trade it effectively between user testing and prototype testing to good effect.

The other major plan for today is to get all the footage shot for the Video to give us enough time is post production to meet Fridays deadline. Shilpi has pretty much completed a script and revised storyboard so fingers crossed we get that all done today ^.^

Last Week's Progress

Another week in the books and we are still making solid progress towards our final product. We managed to get more work done on our prototype and I was able to get the 3d Horse model that we are using in our unity scene to interact with our Leap Motion hands. So currently when a hand hits a horse object the horse become stuck to the palm of the hand and tracks along with it. This is one of the major things that we wanted to achieve with this project, having animations that would react to users and stay on projected onto their skin.

Unfortunately this is only a small piece of the puzzle as currently when the hand leaves the scene the horse also disappears with it. So we still have a long way to go, but I am starting to feel more comfortable working in both C# and unity which is a plus. Additionally Ken managed to get the horse models moving around in a more natural way when they are idle so that should help in attracting participants to our exhibit on the day.

What is more of a problem at the moment is that we are having trouble actually testing our set up despite being finished our physical build of the projector stand. The issue is that the projector we initially had at the start of the semester was actually had a million dead pixels making it virtually useless. Then the only other projector that was available was too heavy to mount onto our build, so we had to try and share with the other groups which was not very effective.

Some testing would definitely help us to sort out some of the scaling issues and actual projection issues which will be sure to happen when we get it fully set up. So this is definitely a cause for concern for myself especially due to the fact the next week we have the Video due and thus far we only have a rough storyboard and no footage.

Late Appraisal Report Feedback

Finally got a good chance to take a look at the Feedback from the other groups in their appraisal reports. Overall there was a lot of interesting comments that really made me think about our project and how we can improve it. However, the major constraint now will be the feasibility of implementing this feedback in the time we have left to build the experience. Getting to the end of week 10 now I know that personally I am starting to feel the pressure to get something complete coded up and suitably working to express our core concept.

[b]Feedback[/b]

A lot of feedback about clarifying our target audience and how this could help flow into both the visual style of our experience but also the story line that we are attempting to present. Again we are trying to stick with a nature theme with cute animals based on previous feedback, and we have currently got a horse model in our Unity prototype which we are hoping to tell a story with. At this point it feels like our experience may be limited to a single story so hopefully we can put enough into it that it evokes emotions and engagement from the audience at the exhibit.

This really leads into the feedback on narrowing our scope. Starting to feel the limits of time we have been getting progressively less ambitious about our interaction and trying to go more for a single deep experience. Adding sound effects both ambient and visual element specific is something that came up again in the feedback and something we are desperately trying to implement into our final design to ensure and immersive experience.

We also got some really good feedback on how to guide users into the experience and allow them to explore rather than explicitly providing them with instructions. Creating an story that starts with an object users want to interact with in the center of the table and them having the story unfold from there seems to be the best option in terms of having users interact with each other and touch hands.

Again there was a lot of feedback about adding multiple user support and additional interactions to the experience. While we would definitely like to implement these features unless there are some major breakthroughs in the next week they are unlikely to happen. They are very much something that would be nice to have but not essential to the project at this stage.

Finally there was questions about why this project would exist outside of the exhibition setting and what human motivations it taps into. The project was really envisaged as an experiential piece of art or installation art that looks to push the boundaries of traditional body projection methods. We are really looking to provide a more emotional connection to a story with this project. Given this feedback we might need to make this more clear in our video and support materials at the exhibition.

No More Public Holidays

With the end of last week, it marks the start of week 10 and the end of public holidays for the semester. Which probably means it is time to get super serious about implementing the rest of our project functionality and build to ensure we have a solid product ready for exhibition with a week to spare.

Recapping last week, we unfortunately missed out on our usual contact session on Tuesday because of the change in schedule. Despite that I still took advantage of the fewer people in the workshop to get myself acquainted with our new friend the Leap Motion controller. After installing the basic SKD and unity packages it became immediately obvious that this was the perfect technology to be using for our desired experience. In hindsight we should have pursued the acquisition of a controller much earlier in the semester to save us wasting development time with the Kinect. However, it was assumed that there were no Leap Motions available at the projects inception.

Despite having to go back to square one with a new technology, out of the box the Leap Motion was already at the same level of progress we had made with the Kinect over the past weeks. I was able to set up the controller our desired unity scene and have hands coming in and interacting easily. Additionally the documentation for Leap Motion and unity made it super simple to understand how the controller data was structured and how to access it. As a result I was able to get access to both frame, arm and hand data by the end of Tuesday. Still overall it was a good experience going through working with Kinect and looking at OpenCV. It really made me appreciate the concept that there are multiple ways to do something, but that trying to use a system in more obscure ways that it was not necessarily  designed for is a lot more complicated than exploring other options.

For the rest of the week Ken and I shared development of the Unity project, to the point where we had by Friday a working prototype where interactions would take place when two hands were close enough to each other. Additionally we managed to figure out the hand / object collision system to get messages sending from objects when they came into contact with any part of a hand or arm. This should give us a really solid platform to develop from this week in getting up a function prototype that we can actually test in the workshop. Huge shout outs to both Isaac and John (I-god and J-god) from Team sign play who helped us with coding suggestions as well as explanations of the Leap data structure. It really highlighted to me again that coding needs a plan, and there is a reason for breaking your code down into reusable chunks and controllers.

In terms of our physical build, our projector stand should hopefully be operational now after some additional reinforcement this week to ensure the main arm could support the weight of a projector mount and an actual projector mounted onto it. Overall I think this leaves us in a pretty good spot going into this week being able to connect our prototype to a top mounted projector and work through any challenges that might present this week. While additionally we can add extra polish to our scenes within unity to better communicate a story without having to stress to much about the video.

Presentation Feedback II

Alright stop.!

Feedback.

Time to listen!

Guess who's back with brand new insights.

For Feedback round two we saw some of the concerns from the first proposal raised again and some really good insights into how we can evolve the project. People were again quick to question how users would know that they were supposed to join hands. Feedback suggested that we should have the scene change the closer users hands got together could help encourage interaction between users. Additionally if we increased the number of participants it might make the experience less awkward though potentially less personal. Personally I think we should focus more on encouraging the interaction between two users and help them create a story 'just for them' to deliver a more immersive experience.

Again people were questioning whether the Kinect will be able to handle our proposed system. It guess we wont really know until we develop the system further. That said we will hopefully have a completed projector stand by the end of this week that we can use to test starting next week.

Additionally there was a lot of positive feedback regarding our idea of implementing sound within the project. People felt that ambient sounds would be effective in not only bringing people into the exhibit but would be essential in making the story feel real. Hopefully with added audio elements we will be able to create a space that invite and also makes people feel comfortable and willing to interact.

Other good feedback was related to the actual interactive space and the scenes that would be displayed on them. How many scenes for example? At this point I will be happy if we can implement one but ideally I would like at least three for the end product. Feedback also suggested that we have objects in the center of the board that invite users to reach out together and cause them to create a straight line. This interplay between users is really what will be deciding factor between a successful project or not.

Finally we need to have a better way of informing people on how they should interact with the system rather than instructions placed on the table. I think this was more of a panic answer to our audience questions as during the break all team members expressed a desire to not have instructions and make the interaction intuitive. The idea of having a hand cut out in the scene or an object in the scene that was hand shaped coming forward.

Hopefully we will be able to dig into this feedback further next week after we have completed our other deliverables for this week.

Presentation Part II: A week in review.

Last week everyone presented their current progress on their projects. Some teams had super impressive prototypes (looking at you Team Not-a-Robot) which made me feel that our team was super behind where we needed to be. On the flip side though some other teams seemed to be struggling a lot more than ours, so I guess that means we are right about where we need to be. Ken has been carrying the team so far with his work in unity getting the prototype up to a point where we could show both the functionality we want to implement and our progress with the Kinect system.

With Ken coding madly Shilpi, Aster and I worked on getting the actual presentation content and interaction plan nailed down. We were in a pretty good position having physically storyboarded our concept in for the first presentation and not changing our method. This left us more time to talk about how we had incorporated feedback from our initial prototyping into our design moving forward which I think was beneficial. Still determining exactly how to scope our success criteria was difficult. It was hard to know how optimistic to be given our current progress on the prototype and inexperience using unity. Being realistic yet challenging enough is always a struggle when working with group expectations.

Overall I think our presentation went well, despite some Kinect and PowerPoint hiccups. We were one of the few teams that actually touched on their background sources and really recapped our project. Also we used the full 10 minutes which has to be a good thing.

Our focus for this week is to continue progressing on our prototype and hopefully have it functioning to the point where we can start implementing the projector and seeing some meaningful interactions. Ken and I will be looking at the materials we need to get things up to scratch and make a fun trip to Bunnings. Additionally we will need to decide as a group how best we can communicate our concept in the explainer video.

Story Boarding Ahoy!

User Testing Recap

[b]My first Day at University[/b]
[i]A short story by an overhead projector.[/i]

It has been a long time since I had been turned on, I was starting to think that nobody loved me anymore :(

But then I got a ride into UQ with this cool guy.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/6ziNTyu.jpg[/img]

Then I got carried around all over the place, talked to some grumpy engineering guys who poked and prodded me. They told me I was not going to explode and put a cool sticker on me so I guess it was ok.

Then I got taken to this cool looking room and thrown on my side. I mean I did not even know I could project onto the floor. MIND BLOWN, and there were cool pictures of bunnies and butterflies.

Today was a good day.

[b]User Testing Feedback Summary.[/b]

Feedback on our first prototyping session was largely mixed, and it is difficult to narrow down how much that feedback was due to the nature of the prototype using an old OHP or the experience itself. While some users enjoyed the scenario we created an the experience, most remarked that it was not very interactive. Having images track users arms (planned) and potentially allowing them to touch the images projected onto them (not planned but interesting) were ideas that came up.

That said everyone who participated in the test stated that they would be interested in experiencing it again, albeit with a different scenario. The theme which came up again was having the ability for users to record their experience so they could share it with others. This is something that we are planning to implement should we get the technology working.

Overall we were interested in testing what kind of emotions or emotive response we could get from users even in a low fidelity test. The overwhelming response was that the image of a bunny hopping along users arms from one participant to another made the biggest connection with people. The scenario was also described as happy and relaxing which is a point in the right direction for our project.

Testers suggested that cute images like the bunny in combination with motion would be a good way to have people interact with each other. Additionally adding in controls for gestures could make the experience feel more interactive and social.

While other suggested scenarios included sci-fi and fantasy themed stories the majority of testers felt that the nature / rainforest theme we had chosen was working well. One suggestion was that we could have the users interacting on different levels of the rainforest dependant on how high or low their arm was. To have for example a sky layer when users hands were higher off the interactive table on the rainforest floor lower down and underground if they were flat on the table.

Overall people liked most the feeling that they were part of the story and the surprise of what was going to happen.

Report BACK!

Fridays report back session was interesting with all the groups giving a quick heads up on where they were in their projects. It was a good chance to get more feedback from the tutors on our project and get an idea of how far ahead / behind we are compared with everyone else. Something that Peter said was super useful in that we should not get lost in the technical implementation and instead go for a simple option which we could build and start testing.

Team Wearables were tossing up between Arduino or RasperryPI to power their wearable device. GoodVibes (CHANGED THEIR NAME, treble makers was an excellent pun so now I am sad) they were also diving into the tech and had a semi-functional prototype. This seemed to be the theme for a lot of teams working their way into the technology and building their prototypes. It makes me feel like we are a little bit behind the eight-ball as we have yet to really start making any meaningful progress towards our digital prototype yet.

The tangible data team has split their group into three with everyone working on something different. Someone was working on gathering data for them and putting in a usable form for unity, someone on building the beast AI and other working on the glove wearable. This really hit home that we need to start allocating some heavy tasks to each team member so that we can get into the meat of this project.  We quickly talked about allocating our work out like such: Unity depth work, Unity animation work, Scenario design work.

Team Zhu are also going to be using the Kinect with depth sensor for their project using unity so we need to make sure we keep in touch with them. Our teams can hopefully work together on coding problems and help with technical issues.

For the presentation next week  we have a lot of work to do in terms of the actual build of the prototype  so thankfully it is an informal presentation. However we need to think about what we want to communicate to the class and the experience we want to deliver at the end.

Tech Time

On Tuesdays session we had demonstrations from both Peter and Jason on technologies we could use in our projects that might be relevant. Peter talked through Arduino's which I had heard about last semester in Digitial Prototyping when we used a Makey Makey. The Arduino is a micro-controller which basically means its a tiny computer that you can fit onto a whole bunch of other attachments to support WiFi and Bluetooth. While they look interesting they are probably not super applicable for our project unless we get around to implementing additional functionality like vibrations and temperature controls.

Jason talked through fiducial marker and how you could use images as markers to create a connection between them using the Kinect. He talked through Reactivision and some of the functionality that the Kinect has out of the box, being able to detect hands open or closed. While this could be interesting to use for our project, because we are planning to have the Kinect mounted from above it will be unable to detect bodies in the normal way. So we will have to use the depth sensor and take the difference of a stock frame with no users in the interaction space and one with the user in the space. Alternatively we could use the infrared camera and put some sort of reflective spots or wearable onto our user. However our team decided that it would be better to avoid putting things on people if possible to keep the interaction simple and barrier free.

Additionally the kinect has a full HD camera which we could use to provide a live stream of what was happening in the installation or record previous interactions and play them back to attract users to the exhibit. Finally the team discussed implementing gestures using the infrared cam having dots on a users hand. Hand open would show the dot and hand closed would hide it so we could have these two states affect the story telling process.

Proposal Feedback

Last week all the groups presented their ideas to the rest of the class for feedback. It was really good to get a better idea on what everyone else will be doing for the exhibition and there were a lot of fun ideas. It was also really good to see some projects evolving already with initial ideas thrown out and refinements made. That was the major feedback our team received on our written proposal and I feel like we did a much better job of explaining our concept and talking through the interaction in the presentation. We gave a concrete scenario which may or may not end up being one of the scenarios we use when we exhibit the project, but regardless it was a really good way to communicate our idea. I also think we did a good job of showing where our inspirations had come from and showing what parts we took from each background project we presented.

Our presentation aside it was good to be able to think critically about other people's projects and help contribute something to their project with the feedback sheets. While at times I got lost in a presentation rather than jotting down notes it was a good exercise. With all the feedback now scanned in I thought I would explore the themes and recurring feedback that our presentation got.
Feedback:

• Touching aspect might be an issue for some users
• Keeping users in the experience and attracting them.
• Adding extra feedback (vibration)
• Story duration (Projection on the table also)
• Emotions and their relation to gestures (Gestures to create visualizations)
• Theme Opposites attract.
• Handling cancelling of interaction early
• Need Theme and message
• Taking the story with them after (tiny gif)
• User boredom
• More people more fun
• How will you make the interactions intuitive?
• Who controls the content? (User vs PreGenerated)

The issue of users personal space causing problems is something that we will have to explore further during our user testing, as we do not want to exclude people from our exhibition. Though we will also be providing a way for people not directly in the interactive zone to view the story. Providing a video showing a live feed like this could also be a good way to attract people to the exhibit. Again we will need to conduct tests to see how long we can maintain users attention to ensure the stories progress quickly enough to avoid boredom.
Exploring the implied meaning of hand gestures and motions is something that we will need to look at as this could definitely help us to nail down a theme for our stories. Coming up with a consistent theme and message to tell through the animations would really help keep users engaged with the installation. Additionally involving users in the content by having them take it away with them or generate some or it, could be an interesting avenue.

Lots to think about and a big week ahead, should be fun ^.^

Feedback Fun

After today's proposal feedback session I am feeling a lot better about the state of our project. Getting the feedback late last night was a little disheartening  and left me feeling like our concept and idea was not good enough. Though after discussing with all of the tutors it seems that our major issue was just the way that we communicated our concept and our interaction method, so hopefully we can do a much better job of explaining during the presentation on Friday.

Based on the feedback we thought a lot more about how the application would actually work and what we would project. We have settled on an installation table where users could sit and place their arms into the view of a projector and kinect. Both the projector and kinect would be mounted above the user and displaying images down onto the users.

Maree helped us define a scenario in which it would be used and how it would work which gave us a much better idea of how to communicate it. In the scenario two users would sit on opposite sides of the installation. One user would have a small seed projected onto their arm when it entered the projected space, while another user would have a rain cloud projected onto them. When the two users extend their arms and touch each other the cloud would rain droplets 'down' onto the seed. So particles would be animated across the two arms and allow the users to share the story.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/qcAmlo3.jpg[/img]

We briefly (and very badly) storyboarded the idea out within the group to make sure everyone was on the same page. And run through how we could physically act out the scenario during Fridays presentation to make it clear to the audience. Having the seed grow from the rain into a sapling and then into a full grown tree with the trunk crossing both users arms.

Now its time to think more about the human values and the emotions we are intending to evoke in people interacting with our project and the type of experience we want to delivery. Our initial ideas and themes all center around nature and growth. So I think we want to give people a sense of stillness and calm and a feeling of building something. Then adding in some playful and more surprising interactions to take advantage of the physical nature of the story telling. For example we discussed what kind of reactions we might get if the tree from the scenario was cut down. Wood chips flying everywhere and then disappearing from the users arms.

Not So Edgy

After the edge the team has a little play at the gallery of modern art. One of the things that I wanted to show the team was the wish cloud. It basically just a big box of speakers suspended above a space you can stand under. But the cool thing about it is that it plays whispers that have been recorded and left by other patrons of the gallery. It is not super relevant to our project but I really enjoyed the experience of being in that space.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/ssWgujX.jpg[/img]

The idea was that people would record their wishes and secrets, but I am pretty sure it did not work out exactly like that. Regardless the recordings are modified in some way that makes them sound more like the chatter of insects than fully formed sentences.

Fast-forward a few late nights, tears (no tears) and lots of writing our project proposal was completed and it was time to enjoy the break and chocolate (no chocolate). Overall I probably spent more time on the break relaxing than I probably should have and working on other subjects, but I feel refreshed and ready to get back into it this week. Especially as we are going to get access to the workshop and all the cool goodies that entails. But mostly the good chairs, im still not sure how they are so much better than the ones in the studio but they are.

So Edgy

Just like that the weeks roll on and the holiday is over the visit to the edge before the break was a really good chance to see what we are in for later in the semester. Daniel also seemed super interesting and like he would be a very good source of knowledge if we get stuck along the way with our concept / development / implementation. We will have to make sure we take full advantage of the edge during our time this semester.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/Ft5DjeE.jpg[/img]

Daniels introduction was short sweet and full of interesting quips or bad jokes and was thoroughly entertaining. After that it was time to explore the rest of the facilities, and while I had already seen most of the spaces on the top floor the area downstairs was really interesting. There was a workshop running so we could not really have a good look around but one of the projects taking over that space would be really fun. Probably not suited to our installation unless our idea changes which is always a possibility, but at this stage we are thinking that one of the booths will be our most likely exhibition spot.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/Z6MixOq.jpg[/img]

They are roomy enough and have all the trimming that we could want in the space. Though we will probably have to block out the windows to ensure we get good quality projections.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/HLm7UT8.jpg[/img]

The projectors that are installed in the bays are designed to project onto the windows or a screen but there did not seem to be an ability to have them tilt down and project from above onto the floor.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/NwjEnvZ.jpg[/img]

Power and all the important points located close by.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/ExlMqhM.jpg[/img]

These speakers were hiding up in the sections overlooking the walkway across from the booths, they could be potentially useful.

Week 3: Looking Forward

Time to talk about next week and build a success plan for the coming onslaught. I think that week four is going to be the week where it finally hits that yes I am in fact back at uni again, things had been moving slowly in most of my courses but the ramp up starts now. Tuesdays session at the Edge means its serious business now and as a team we should hopefully have a solid idea to pitch.

At the moment we are still a little unsure of the exact nature our design is going to undertake, we have some ideas and potential interactions all including augmented reality and projected images onto bodies. But what types of projections and how the projections on one person could interact with another is still something we have yet to nail down as a group.

The feedback from Fridays brainstorming session was helpful in narrowing our focus down to designing a sensory and bodily experience, now we just need to figure out the type of experience we want to create and how social or independent we want to make it.

Looking forward there is not much time for us to finalize these sorts of ideas before the project proposal is due next Thursday. We are going to have to rapidly develop a plan for the proposal document and allocate tasks accordingly to ensure that we can produce something that clearly presents our idea and how we hope to implement it.

Having one of our team members missing at the Friday session and without the template yet for the project proposal I am preparing for a challenging week ahead. However, I feel that if we can make good use of our session at the Edge and start finalise roles and responsibilities for the document on Tuesday we will be ok.

Week 3: Team Time

Unfortunately this week I missed out on the Tuesday session so I was not able to participate in the world cafe but in talking with other students later in the week and reading through others blog posts I was hopefully able to get the gist of what happened.

Thankfully I was able to arrive early for the Friday session which gave me time to look through all the brainstorming work that had gone on around the clustered ideas and themes that had been generated through the world cafe process. This proved to be a great way to catch up on what I missed out on Tuesday and help me decide how I wanted to order my preferences and vote.

The voting process itself was very interesting to be a part of with such a large group. I had experienced a similar team formation process last year and it is always interesting to see which themes or ideas will be the most popular. As we had to write down both what we could bring to a potential project and what we wanted to learn with our votes it was interesting to learn what other people felt they were stronger or weaker in.

Thankfully I was able to be in a group with my first preference and people who voted similarly too me. 3/4 team members both had the same 1st and 2nd preference for projects to work on which should hopefully help us work together. After we got all the team formation formalities out of the way (Facebook Group, GoogleDrive, Contact Details sharing) we got down to business brainstorming and exploring our project area.

Below are some of the bubbles of ideas and thoughts we came up with:

[img]http://i.imgur.com/fw8TlHw.jpg[/img]

Firstly we had to clarify whether we wanted to go with a more wearable style design that could physically augment peoples senses and bodies or use projections and augmented reality to create illusions and more tricks of the mind style interactions.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/Mhl4aEs.jpg[/img]

Our early ideas were heavily influenced by the addition of music to our designs probably due to the fact that we all had music as a second preference.

Once we had decided to go with a projection and augmented reality style system rather than a wearable device, we looked at two possible options to explore. Projections for educations purposes or projections for play.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/bGKUqxH.jpg[/img]

[img]http://i.imgur.com/OltpO4z.jpg[/img]

Digital Doodling

[b]Digital Doodling[/b]

Digital doodling is a physical computing project which aims to users with a playful and nostalgic way of expressing their identity and sharing their experiences with others. It involves participants using their own or others body as a canvas to draw images which can be printed into temporary Tattoos. Unlike drawing on yourself or Tattooing with ink digital doodling will project the image onto the users skin so they can skill draw in real time without leaving any marks. This allows them to undo mistakes and see what an image would look like on their body before committing to a real Tattoo.

Traditional Tattoos are still relatively permanent with the exception of painful and expensive laser treatments to remove them they are stuck on your body forever. This can lead to feelings of remorse from people who have existing Tattoos they regret and apprehension from those considering them. This apprehension is the problem this project is looking to ease by creating an environment in which designs can be accurately represented on a person's skin without the lasting effects. If a user likes the look of an image they can have it printed onto temporary Tattoo transfer paper so they can try before they buy.

This style of system could be implemented in Tattoo studios to help clients make purchasing decisions. Alternatively it is an easy way for designers and creative's to share their work and express themselves.

[b]Photo Of Poster[/b]

[img]http://i.imgur.com/EWAlXoL.jpg[/img]

[b]Links to inspirations:[/b]
[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz17lbjOFn8[/url]
[url]http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/[/url]
[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3XPUdW9Ryg[/url]
[url]http://www.wired.com/2014/10/smartwatch-projects-buttons-onto-skin/[/url]

Week 2 Idea Factory

It is almost the end of week 2 already and the idea well has not run dry to much as it did not really get dug in the first place. Thankfully people around me provided inspiration with a friend getting a Tattoo recently and blankly staring at Peters during Tuesday studio session. The brain started firing and the Google machine was well and truly fired up.[img]img/s4175953_56e13d1f5f138.jpg[/img]My initial idea was just to make Tattoos animated or project designs onto people so they could see what they would look like. But after some searching I found that there are already implant style devices [url]http://tinyurl.com/jnetou2[/url] and then some that worked just like temporary Tattoos [url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iFuTaqD4fM[/url][img]img/s4175953_56e13d5d13007.jpg[/img]Finally trying to think about how this could be not just cool but actually useful and the people it would serve a purpose for.[img]img/s4175953_56e13d8289940.jpg[/img]

Week 1/2 Process

Most of my early ideas centered around big data and the privacy issues which I found relating to it. The case where Target knew about a girls pregnancy before her own father did was equal parts amusing and terrifying. Link is at [url]http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2014/04/15/3985934.htm[/url]

This got me thinking about the power of our individual data and if you could trace out the path your information travels from a single click. Or plot the potential flow on effects from one transaction in one way or another.

[img]img/s4175953_56e13c9884532.jpg[/img]

There was an idea around the using water and some sort of projection overlay after watching the following video [url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V2zMauPoNc[/url] and having data flowing out of people or being able to depict the flow on effects of transactions with actual water.

[img]img/s4175953_56e13ccd0037f.jpg[/img]

But I still kept coming back to the idea of some sort of meta-data checkout. Where people could enter as much or as little of their personal information as they wanted to and then receive some Monopoly money. Which they could then use to buy other peoples information.

[img]img/s4175953_56e13cef2488b.jpg[/img]

Week 1 All Over Again

Week one of physical computing down and I already feel like my brain is about to burst. I spent most of my time this week familiarizing myself with the course website and exploring the resources that were already posted up there.

[b]Take Aways from Video's[/b]

There were just a few videos to say the least. Some were fun, some were clever, others did not seem to have a whole lot of anything going on with them. But they definitely helped to give a sense of the style of installation and the type of scale that we should be aiming for with our initial project ideas to present next week. Have some sort of installation that people could interact with but allow the installation to interact with the audience also.

[b]Take Aways from Readings[/b]

The reading resources posted on the website and on slack in particular [url]https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/understanding-industrial-design-playful[/url] were helpful in unpacking the idea of playful designs and how that is different from simple gimmicks. A playful design needs to excite and appeal on an emotional level but without compromising the functionality of the actual product or experience itself.
Below are my notes from and key points from some of the resources I read.

[i]• Why does it exist? What is it? How does it work? What values it supports? How is it different from something else?[/i]
[i]- Remove pain points, utilize standards, defy expectations (playfully, snap out of everyday routine) Hitting on the emotional not just the functional[/i]
[i]- Lower the discoverability increase the suprise[/i]
[i]• Domo Toaster - Playfulness is in opposition to functionality (Gimmick)[/i]
[i]- Ironic mashups need to resonate instantly[/i]
[i]• Meet -> Try -> Surprise[/i]
[i]• Narrative products - Playful nudges[/i]
[i]• "If the behaviour your designing for happens in the physical world, then its important to integrate the nudge with a physical interaction"[/i]
[i]• Human Values - Amusement, Humor (Add a moment of humour without getting in the way)[/i]

Now that I had a better understanding of the types of designs we are trying to come up with it was time to generate some ideas. The only stopping point was I really had no idea of the problems that people face in areas like Human Ageing and Early Learning. Big Data and Internet of Things were again terms that I had heard of but what a physical computing idea related to either of these topics looked like or could look I am still not to sure about.  

Regardless my next step was to start looking into what was Big Data and the internet of things. Why are they things, why do people care about these topics? From what I could tell the problem with Big Data revolved around privacy and how this data could be mishandled. While the internet of thing devices often suffered from being gimmicky or providing features that did not actually add to an experience.

IoT and Big Data are definitely going to be the areas that I investigate more this coming week. I feel like I need to understand firstly what they are before I can start generating relevant ideas.