Recently I had a discussion about my final project with Niels Clausen-Stuck (my advisor) from Designit and Jan-Christoph Zoels from Experientia. I still have to digitalize all the feedback that I got from them but for now here is my presentation. It’s style is something that I developed earlier this year – mixing post-it notes with photos. It’s seems to be working because people love it 
Last month I was helping Jacob Sikker Remin with his first solo exhibition.
First thing was to program light tubes animation. Jacob constructed a cube out of them I asked I we can program them so they light moves like in a snake game. Hmm. Sure After 2 hours I had a prototype in Processing.
Then we ported it to Arduino so he can install stand alone version at the exhibition. The results were amazing. I wish I was there..
Next I was given a piece of text by Jacob that he wrote after being inspired by Enzio Manzini lecture on future of design. My task was to automate process of filing screen with a sentence and make an animation out of this sequences. Here is the result mixed with music, drawings and animation contributed by Jacob’s friends and his wife:
That later was remixed by Rosa Menkman into this:
You can find more photos in Jacob’s flickr set :
standing on the shoulders of giants – exhibit pics.
At the end of the Tangible User Interface course there was an exhibition as always. Almost half of our class didn’t sleep that night to get our stuff done but it was worth it
In the final show we used three laptops with two webcams connected to each of them. All networked together via WiFi and connected to the beamer projecting images on the wall.
People liked it much more than I expected. They played with the cameras, experimented with them and used them to spy other people.
I was really happy after the show. Much more than the day before
For the presentation during friday in the second week we finally came up with name and logo for our project:
Presentation went ok. Our concept was quite strong but the only prototype we could show was this remote SLR control. Not very impressive for two weeks of work comparing to other groups…
Third week started and we didn’t feel well with using SLR Cameras for our prototype. They are expensive, quite big and heavy. We really wanted to created something even more tangible, something that you can play with. In face of lack of both time and skill to build our own camera we finally decided to go for webcams. Ujjval bought some old / broken webcams on the flee market during weekend and started to test them immediately.
We hadn’t enough cameras so we ordered 5 more – the cheapest we could find. They were delivered two days later and this was a good time to move to the electronic lab.
At this point we decided that we are going to create 5-6 cubes/boxes with one button and one flash light and put webcams inside. We couldn’t use camera buttons for triggering image capture because we were using Macs and macam drivers and processing wasn’t able to handle that. So we needed USB cord for video data from camera, and some additional wires from button and light to Arduino board to control the electronics. We even considered putting everything inside one fat cord but eventually we left USB cord alone and used tape to stick other wires to it.
Buttons test:
We couldn’t find any strong white LED’s so we decided to use red ambient LED that could be visible through white milky acrylic.
Next I focused on programming side. A here things started to complicate. First we found out that using more than one Camera of the same brand connected to the same computer is not as easy as you could imagine. Most drivers don’t support that. And even it they do you can’t capture from all of the cameras at the same time. What’s more Processing can’t use more than one camera of the same brand at all because it refer to them by name which is usually the same for all connected webcams. Slightly better situation is in OpenFrameworks where you can refer to the camera by it’s id. But still we didn’t manage to connect more that two of the same brand.
It was real driver hell. I spend like 3 or more days switching from OS X to Windows, from Processing to OpenFramework and restarting my computer every time Processing sketch crashed (what happened many times). Often coding until late in the night.
At the same time Ujjval started making boxes. First prototype was from cardboard.
The second one was from transparent acrylic. This time we used laser cutter for the first time. It’s awesome!
Ujjval is real master when it comes to hand work.
Additionally because of his architecture background drawing models schemas for laser cutter was super easy for him so mass production of the boxes went very quickly. We even designed our own micro shield for Arduino to easily connect all wires from the boxes to the board.
Although Ujjval did most of the hands work I also got my hand dirty. I tried to cut boxes from the cardboard and do some soldering to have a break from programming.
Final test before exhibition:
Uff. TUI course is over. It was a long month with a lot of work and many moments of frustration.
We spent first week on concept development. Initially we had a lot of problems figuring out what we really wanted do. Before starting this course I thought that we will be working on some multitouch or reactable stuff. But to my surprise brief for this course forbad us from using screens in our projects. Hmmmmmmm.
Also during the first week we were introduced to laser cutter.
This wonderful machine can cut any shape you can imagine and draw in a vector graphics program from paper, cardboard and even plexi glass up to 5mm. It can also engrave on wood and aluminum.
We had a lot ideas, some bad and boring, other even worse. Finally after looking for inspiration in nature we decided to create object that can work on their own but at the same time they are part of a bigger group. Something like insects. This way idea of networked cameras was born. Project code name “many eyes”. It was a simple idea. We have several cameras, when you click one of them, every other camera takes a photo at the same time. As we experienced later, simplest ideas a hardest to implement…
To better explain our idea during reviews in the end of the week we quickly developed some scenarios (drawings by Ujjval) :
During second week we focused on refining our idea and building an experience prototype.
I started by programming a Flash web application.
You opened a web page that displayed a live capture from your webcam. When you pressed a button a picture was taken on each computer viewing this page at this time. Pictures were saved and send to the server where you could watch them on another site. We did some test and even tried to shoot matrix like photos but laptops are too big and too clunky to fully convey the experience.
A the same time Ujjval (we were together in a team) prepared some wooden mockups.
If they were small enough they could be even wearable. Imagine these crazy photos if you could take it with you to the party
If you think they are too small to be possible to create look at this chewing gum sized camera.
Ujjal also taught me how to make an origami camera. If you want to make one for yourself here is a tutorial on Flickr : Origami camera.
Another way to simulate the experience was to use already existing cameras. So we decided to use several SLR cameras to trigger photos by using remote controls. Original remote controls are quite expensive so we built our own You need just a couple of wires and optocoupler. After a few minutes of experimenting and checking which pins in remote control plug do what we need we ended up with this:
In the final test we had two Arduino boards talking to each other wirelessly. One with button and second one connected to the ‘remote control’. It worked
It was end of second week and we still weren’t happy with our idea.
Today we put some life into our little circuits.
That’s what I was looking for! Today was first day of physical computing course 
After presentations of our visiting teachers Massimo Banzi (one of the guys that created Arduino) and Gwendolyn Floyd we received our Arduino starter kits. Yeah!
So now you wonder what is Arduino? It’s a small piece of electronics that can be easily programmed and extended.
But what can it do? Hmm. Just watch this video. It took me less than 1h to learn how it works and build this tetris game controller. It’s has three buttons for going right, left and rotating blocks and light sensor to send them to the bottom of the screen.
