Category: Interactive I

Interactive II Semester Project – Chosen: A project about friendships

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSmvZKU2P58]

This project reflects my own thoughts and emotions regarding the relationships in my life. It basically asks the audience to judge other people based on whatever they may know about them. It brings to mind the idea of dating sites and apps such as Tinder and even the whole process of people ‘liking’ things on Facebook and other social media. One big issue that I address in this project, however, is the feeling of rejection when a person is NOT chosen. I use the sound of a gunshot as well as counting the number of times a person is chosen to emphasize this.

Ideally, I would try to include people whom the audience is connected to personally. Due to the unfeasibility, however, I chose to put images of well-known people and characters so that the audience is at least aware of who they are and what they may represent. I also added in images of schoolmates which may be familiar to some people but complete strangers to others.

The following video documents my process of creating this project:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvFD6guoabA]

The main challenges in building this patch were:

– Getting the photos from the file to appear in MAX

– Ensuring that the photos changed when they needed to change

– Keeping count of how many times each person was chosen

– Syncing the counts from all 3 matrices and updating the coll object accurately

 

I initially aimed to take photos of the audience to include in the list of images, and also to create a ‘leaderboard’ of the top few chosen people. I came close to solving these issues but in the end did not have enough time and know-how to do so.

However, I feel that the project was nevertheless very successful; it certainly attracted a lot of attention and I could really see people actively making decisions and choosing between the options. Even after they thought they’d made their final decision, some people would glance back and see someone else whom they would prefer. I think that to improve this project, I perhaps could have further emphasized the rejection of the un-chosen people.

 

‘CHOSEN: A project about friendships’ by Esmond Heng

Interactive II Phidgets Project

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWPkKeVPOCk]

This stroking finger device mimics the action of a person stroking his/her finger across your skin. I felt that it was apt considering how often we use our fingers to navigate computer screens via mouse or touchpad.

The finger attachment is joined with a loose hinge that enables it to glide across the skin smoothly and also move further than what would have been possible without the hinge.

The movement can also be set to automatic and its speed can be adjusted.

 

by Esmond Heng

Semester Project Update!

Here’s a quick status update on our semester project!

What we’ve managed to do so far:

– Using Boids2D, we created boids to simulate fish
– Combined with the tracking ability of blobs.centroids, the boids follow after a moving target, in our case a walking person
– Created a gif image of a moving fish and inserted it to replace the boids
– Managed to accurately rotate the fish such that they seem to be swimming in the direction that they are moving in

This video shows a peek of what’s happening:

Some issues that have to be sorted out:

– All the fish follow the same rotation
– When the fish collide, their alpha channels blend together
– What happens if there is more than one person?

Suggestions/feedback will be helpful! We want to push this idea further, probably by projecting the image of water surface (so that it seems that the person is walking on water) and created water ripples when the person is moving.

Thank you all!

Esmond, Cindy, Vivian, Pearlynn.

Emulation Assignment Rough Concept

Esmond, Pearlynn

Concept

Our concept is based on the movement of the viewer. Using face detection, the viewer when stationery will see his/her face covered with fuzziness/dark glitches around him. In order to get rid of the fuzziness and see his face clearly, he must move around so that the “fuzziness” doesn’t consume him. This idea is based on the game ‘Tilt To Live’ where the player has to navigate through ever-chasing particles without getting caught by them.

 

*Update (13 Nov)

Concept has been completely changed. New concept is based on the idea of tracking the movement of people through a space and assigning sounds to different areas. Hence, as people move from A to B, different sounds will play according to where they are in the space.