Tobias Toft

The second week of the physical computing course ended with a small exhibition/presentation where we had the honour of having Bill Verplank as part of the external crit group. The second week was dedicated to developing a small concept and building a working prototype. The brief that Gwen gave us said:

Home automation and the internet of things enable our intelligent objects to silently communicate amongst themselves at faster and higher degrees of autonomy. This requires less and less interaction and relationship with the user. These trends also create and depend on cycles of replacement and upgrading, leading to the rapid discarding of old objects. Our project will challenge these behaviors of passivity and obsolescence by exploring and adapting the cultural, physical, and psychological user interfaces that reside in the objects we have given up on or replaced. How can new interactions with and between our old objects create more meaningful, engaging, and thoughtful relationships with contemporary situations, needs, and desires?

As more and more behaviors and interactions get packed into smaller and smarter objects, what are the physical gestures and interactions we threw away with “outdated” technology that could add logic, humanity, and meaning to our daily lives or specific situations.

Please find old objects and re-imagine their functionality: the way they interact with either another object, other objects, people, or the computer in new and relevant ways.

The result of that brief ended up in many different projects, ranging from games to physical products and public installations. Our project dealt with how technology makes our lives more efficient, but at the same time steal more time from us. We wanted to create a product that would facilitate break time in the otherwise hectic workday at the office. The project was called “Rock is the new swivel” and basically combines a rocking chair, Gilbert O’Sullivan and a coffee machine. Sounds strange? I’ll explain the project in more detail in the beginning of next week when we have a video ready. Meanwhile, check out the pictures from the exhibition (thanks to Ashwin by the way – he helped me by taking a lot of the pics).

Two weeks ago we started the physical computing class. The course was based on learning how to use the Arduino board as well as different basic electronic components, accelerometers, ultra sound distance sensors, servo motors and different analog sensors – our teachers in electronics and Arduino were David Mellis and Massimo Banzi, and Gwendolyn Floyd helped us with the inspiration and conceptual level. The Arduino board is probably the easiest microcontroller board to get started with, it has a large online community around it and everything is open source – that makes it really easy to get help, instructions or inspiration on how to use it. The topic wasn’t new to me – I have been working with both Arduino (which is Atmel based) and PIC processors before and know a bit about electronics and programming, but it was great to spend some time letting my inner geek loose. In the end of the first week we did some mini-projects, where the focus was on communication between two Arduino boards (via serial). I worked with Jason from Taiwan on two small rubber robots, one was sensing motion and the other one was reacting to what the first one experienced. The following video show the bots, it doesn’t really do them justice, but at least it gives an impression of their behavior. In the video it looks like they are physically connected, but actually they are not.

I was impressed with how quickly people actually got to use the Arduinos – even people that never tried either electronics or microprocessor programming before, created fairly complex interactive contraptions in only one week. Below is a bunch of pictures from the first week – notice how our class room rather quickly turned into a room filled with small robots, electronic junk, tools, sketches on crumpled paper and empty coffee cups. Second week it got even better.

By the way, the latest issue of Wired had an interesting article on Arduino and Massimo.

Here comes an update – only a week late! The second foundations course was a short 1-week course in video prototyping. Video prototyping is about sketching a product or service concept using video as the medium – the outcome is not a polished video, but a video showing and explaining the overall features of the service in short time. The course covered the process from storyboarding and making props to shooting and editing using basic tools (like iMovie).

This video was shot and edited in 2 days. Before that an even more low fidelity and low resolution version was made. The video prototype is about the “KeyLess” service, a concept that the whole class worked with (it was open for interpretation). KeyLess is basically a service for people who often forget or lose their keys – just call Keyless, and you will have a set of spare keys within 30 minutes. As the video is not an ad, but a concept description, you will also see shots of the verification process at the KeyLess office as well as agreeing on a meeting place (in this case Trianglen).

It took some effort convincing the 7-Eleven girl to be in our movie, but besides that everything went smooth.

The last two weeks have been really great! I’ve learned a lot, and I have found myself a new field of interest: Computational Design. The exhibition went well, and I think it is a nice way of ending a course. Tomorrow we’ll start the video scenario course, looking very much forward to that one too!

Here’s some of the pictures I took during the exhibition. You can also go directly to my photostream at Flickr.

Here’s a quick pre-release! My poster for the exhibition this afternoon.

The graphics on the poster describe the head and hand movements of people performing a typical greeting from their home country. Recorded data (using a Wii Remote) consisting of the pitch and roll values of the movements, has been normalised and divided into 400 steps each. The visualisation – formed by coloured ribbons – allows a comparison of the different greetings just by looking at the overall shape.

Coloured Ribbons - my poster based on computational design

Tomorrow is the last day of the Computational Design course. We’re ending the course with an exhibition, where we are showing our work. Basically it is going to be a mix between posters and interactive installations to try out. All based on data from a Wii Remote. This post is just going to be short: 3 pictures I took right before leaving this evening.

Preparing hangers for the posters in the exhibition room

The eMacs are almost ready for running the Processing sketches

Meanwhile Erlend is sucking out the last bit of information from Dennis’ brain

There will be more information later this weekend, when the exhibition is over and I am sober (that almost rhymes).

First post in a long time! Last week and this week has been all about computational design. I assume you all know what computational design is, but for the guy who accidentally got in here while searching for pictures of the Pope riding a chopper, i’ll try to explain it anyway:

Computational design is basically when you use a computational approach to design something. It can be everything from physical products to pure aesthetics (e.g. this fuzzy thing called art). It is often used in the field of “information visualization”, where you use computational methods to visualize information graphically to give an overview of e.g. large or complex amounts of data. This is where computers come in handy, as computational design often includes a lot of math and calculations. A classical example of computational graphics is the visualization of Mandelbrot sets. Mandelbrot sets are practically impossible to draw by hand because of their complexity, but for computers it is a piece of cake.

Mandelbrot sets would not be funny to draw by hand

My task for this week is to visualize and present data that we (my group consisting of an american, an indian, an italian, a korean and two danes) have collected by strapping a WiiRemote to people’s hands and heads while they do the common greeting of their home country. Meaning that the danish guy is shaking hands, the italian girl is kissing cheeks, the indian guy is bowing and so on. I’m not really sure how to do it yet, but I have an idea of visualizing the accelerometer data in a way that will show the similarities of the different greetings. On friday we will be exhibiting the results of these two weeks, with both static and interactive stuff to look at and try out.

We use Processing to gather and visualize the data. It is quite easy to get started with Processing – especially if you know a little bit of programming (especially Java) beforehand. I did some small programs in Processing last week, before starting the greetings-project. One of my first sketches was an interactive clock, with three trees growing according to the current time of the day. The trees are generated by using recursive mathematical functions (mostly vectors as in linear algebra) spiced up with a bit of randomness, giving an almost infinite number of different kinds of trees.

The partly interactive Tree Clock

By the way, the trees also react to the sound in the room, so if you shout at them, they will shiver.

Another thing I have been doing is a graphics filter, based on the work of Craig T. MacKenzie, that maps pixels in an image and draw lines between them. The result is not as beautiful as Craig’s PixelPath images, but at least I learned a lot about processing images and handling large amounts of data.

A close-up image of a patio heater used for testing my code

The filter approximately half way through processing the image above

The final result

If you’re interested in seeing some really nice computational art, take a look at Alex Dragulescu’s work or just search Google for “computational art”.

Oh yeah, and for the guy who was looking for that “Pope on a chopper”-image. Here it is:

The Pope on a chopper

If you want more Pope-images, go here.