Final Project - Your Touch Powers My Heart

Our final project for the course was an updated and improved iteration of our sketch 2 wearable project. The action of the lights and sensor in sketch 2 were not quite what we had wanted and the final project provided us with the opportunity to improve these aspects of the old project while also adding in a second touch interaction and improving the design of the garment itself.

We began by going back to the drawing board a bit in order to refine the form of the outfit and brainstorming other ways the light could react more poetically. 

 The lights remained located in the left sleeve of the shirt but were extended into the slightly armor-like asymmetrical collar. The intention with the lights in the collar was to be able to cast light up onto the wearer's face in order to mimic a blush. In addition to the touch sensor in the hand a soft pressure switch was placed in the shoulder of the garment. While the sensor in the palm allowed the shirt to react to intentional contact initiated by the wearer the shoulder switch was meant to allow the shirt to react to unintentional and potentially unwelcome contact such as the jostling and compression of personal space in crowded environs such as a subway.

While the shirt was being designed we quickly prototyped the circuit that was going to be integrated into it using a prototyping breadboard. By setting up the circuit on the board we were able to develop and test the arduino code while the shirt was still under construction.

Arduino Sketch can be downloaded from here

While the code and circuit were being designed the shirt was also being designed and prototyped. The shirt had two main components. 

The undershirt, which was made from a reflective, silvery fabric would hold the LED's and the majority of the wearable circuit. The undershirt was meant to only be visible on the left arm and the collar of the wearer and so the shirt itself was comprised of that sleeve and a small bodice on the torso. Over this silvery material a second layer was added made from a translucent, black fabric in order to diffuse the light coming from the LED's and hide the circuitry from view as well as bring the look of the undershirt more into balance with the leather over-shirt.

The Overshirt: Fashionable, pretty, slightly dangerous looking. Mimics armor in the shoulder and asymmetrical collar, tailored to make the waist look slim. The overshirt has far less of the technology integrated into it and makes most of its statement through its own aesthetic appearance. The only circuit present in the shirt is in the high collar where a line of red LED's are placed. These LED's are hidden by the collar and aimed at the wearer in order to throw a small amount of red light onto the face in order to mimic a blush.

The over-shirt went through 3 iterations in its design. Beginning as a paper prototype of a shirt it was then prototyped using an old brown pleather we had lying around from past projects. Once the size, cut, and tailoring had been planned out in these prototype shirts we tore them apart in order to make the pattern for the final version which was made from a softer black pleather material.

When combined together the pieces make a single, sleek and subtly sci-fi asymmetrical garment.

Sketch #2 Your Touch Powers My Heart

Following the development of the 3 proposals detailed in the previous post we decided to go forwards with the hair light option. We began collecting materials including, accelerometers, LED's and found a local supplier of side-emitting fiberoptic cable. When we went to acquire the wig that was to hold the circuit and lights we came across an LED and fiber-optic affro wig.

It was hideous.

After looking at what such a thing could end up looking like we decided to see if we could find other ways to display touch and motion inputs.

We decided to incorporate the lights into a shirt that is intended to form a base upon which we can build further details such as an adapted version of the defense suit or other interactions. In its initial state the shirt is meant to incorporate the touch aspect of our hair idea, with the LED's stitched into the shirt lighting up and pulsing when the wearer touches someone.

Building:


We began the build by designing the circuit and sensor as a hard circuit using Fritzing and a physical breadboard.

Following the setup of the circuit and the writing of the basic touch/pulse code work could begin on the shirt and glove using the hard circuit as a guide.

The LED's were to light up in stages depending upon how long the touch was maintained, with each layer connecting to a different digital pin that was tasked to begin pulsing after a set number of pulses had been completed by the preceding sets of LED's.

On the shirt we wanted this progression to move from the forearm closest to the point of contact, up the arm towards the collar and eventually close to the heart.

In order to achieve this 4 sets of led's were sewn onto the undershirt, each in parallel working their way up the arm.

The sensor was to be sewn into the hand of the glove so that it could read when the user touched another person. The capacitive sensors we first looked at were ideal in term of their interaction but proved bulky as a result of the board they were placed within which made placing them upon the finger difficult.

In order to get around this we attempted to make our own touch sensor by placing an open wire into analog pin 0. A second wire was connected to power and ground and the connection between the two was left unconnected. When we tested this we were able to get a consistent change in the value read through analogRead when that connection was bridged by skin in order to detect a touch.

This solution allowed us the freedom of movement we needed in the fingers and worked consistently in the hard circuit. Unfortunately it proved far less predictable once incorporated into the soft-circuit of the glove. Further iterations will look into ways of achieving a similar touch reading in the palm or back of hand where the more stable capacitive sensors may work without hindering the wearer.

With the two pieces together, wired into the arduino placed upon the forearm the shirt lit up exactly as we had hoped, the light building up the arm and softly pulsing.





Finally, to start working towards the moveable clothing possibilities we were exploring with the defense suit idea we added a gauzy, stretchable shawl wrapped over galvanized wire ribs at the shoulders. In further iterations those ribs will hopefully be linked to hinges and small servo-motors which will make the clothing flaps rise and fall in order to change the outfit's shape.

Sketch 2 Ideations

With the course shifted into wearables we have bee exploring soft circuits and brainstorming ideas for what to build for the next project. Our 3 favorite ideas are detailed below (and modeled by Jaques the embarassed wearables scale dude.)

Fiber-optic hair:

The first options involves threading fiber-optic strands into hair-extensions or wigs which will be lit by RGB LED's embedded in the hair.                         

     These hair lights will be connected to an arduino board and an accelerometer sewn into a sleeve garment that tracks the direction of movement and sends that info to the red, green and blue variables of the LED, thus changing the color of the hair depending on the wearers motion. An additional touch sensor placed in the fingertips of the sleeve's glove allows us to track human contact with the user and use this data to flare the brightness of the LED's when the user comes into contact with other people.A secondary option with the execution of the lit hair is to use a dreadlock wig where we can embed led's into the thick cords of hair along with the fiber-optic clusters so that we could augment the thin strands of light with clusters and points of light scattered throughout the hair.

Fuzzy Night-Friend

Inspired during a brainstorm session that was originally focused on coming up with alternatives to flash-lights and night-lights for children. This wearable option places a comforting, fuzzy companion on the shoulder of the wearer as part of a scarf or shawl. Light sensors in the shawl detect when the user moves into a dark area and the fuzzy creature on the shoulder responds to the dark space by lighting up and emitting a comforting, purring vibration. This comforting presence is further augmented by the interaction of the user petting, or rubbing the plush creature to let it know the user is ok, at which point it will quiet down and simply provide light.

Personal Space Protection Clothes

The final option was for a line of clothing that reacted to the user's discomfort at loud noises or personal space violations by becoming larger or more threatening in shape. This was inspired by the way that various animals change their body when threatened such as raised hackles, fluffed up feathers, stiffened muscles and other actions to make themselves seem larger and more intimidating. The clothing would express its users discomfort in similar ways, inflating around the shoulders and neck, thickening arms, or possibly involving expanding feathered collars.

Sketch 1 Final Stage: A Fairy Companion

After settling on the children's fairy companion from our stage 2 ideation we set about working on implementing the idea using Max/MSP/Jitter.

We started by planning out exactly how to go about achieving our desired effect. The program would need to detect a person on camera and react to that person's position and actions, drawing the fairy near the figure's location. To detect a person in the frame we chose to use the background subtraction technique we were shown in class in order to isolate any figures entering the frame. We then went through a variety of attempts to reliably track the position of a figure in the frame and make use of the x/y location data. We began by using cv.jit.bounds to get a bounding box around the figure which we could draw the x and y co-ordinates from.

This solution turned out to be sub-optimal however as noise in the camera feed often resulted in multitudes of fluctuating and unpredictable boxes and location updates were jumpy and led to undesirable and jumpy animation of the fairy.

cv.jit.centroids gave us a different set of x/y co-ordinates and we found that tying the fairy to this output resulted in far smoother and more attractive motion.


Another alternative we briefly explored made use of the cv.jit.faces tool to track faces in a black and white video feed. This gave us an x/y point at the centre of any face that entered the frame which made for fairly smooth and easy info to pass to the part of the patch handling fairy animation. The face version also allowed us to have multiple people in the frame. Unfortunately the solution was extremely taxing on the CPU and crashed nearly ever time we tried to test it and had to be abandoned.

The fairy itself began as a simple circle, drawn at a location slightly offset from the x/y position provided by the figure tracking. Its location would shift as the person moved, seeming to follow nearby. This simple circle was replaced later on with a small picture of a fairy, animated in flash and played in the sketch as a looping movie.

Project Ideation Phase 2

In the lab following our team's first brainstorming phase we learned that the camera/projector set-up that the whole class would be using made all our ideas unfeasible in their current configurations. A further brainstorming period was required in order to improve our ideas and adapt them for the classroom's equipment set-up.

Most of the ideas we tossed around were extensions from the Invisible Friend idea from phase 1, and of those ideas there were a few that seemed viable and are detailed below.

An Emotional Fairy
Audience: Children (though adults are allowed to play too)

What is it: Taking inspiration from a line in Peter Pan that said "fairies are so small that they only have room in their heads for one emotion at a time." We have decided to create a digital fairy that will follow, flit about, and interact with people who are visible on camera. The fairy would be depicted as a glowing colored ball of light, with the color depicting its emotion. The fairie's default state is to orbit around and follow the user, maintaining about a 1' distance. If the user stays very still for a while or moves slowly enough the fairy will calm and fly in closer. Potentially landing upon the user for a time.

The fairie is easily startled and its emotions react to speed of movement from the user. A curious fairy will follow a running child moving away from it but fast, abrupt movements towards the fairie when it has drawn close will startle it and send it zipping away and then flying quickly around the user. Waving and swiping at it when its scared will freak it out even more, potentially leading to angry dive-bombings. Slow, calming movements from the user will coax it back down and perhaps once again land on their hand.

Playful Shadow
- 2 people in different rooms interacting with one another’s shadows
Peter Pan's Shadow

Continuing the Peter Pan inspirations, this idea was born from our wish to take the invisible friend through footprints theme up onto the wall where the projector will be aimed.

In this case the goal is to have the camera tracking the user's silhouette and the projector sending that silhouette back onto the screen offset slightly from the user and acting as his/her shadow. After an initial period where it perfectly matches the users movements the shadow will begin to mis-behave, taking on a life of its own and interacting with the user.

Achieving this second shadow seems challenging and the team tossed around possibilities for pre-recorded movements and other solutions before deciding that a dual set of the interactions could work to create the effect. A second camera and projector in a different room could be tracking a different person's silhouette. And each "misbehaving" shadow is in-fact the motions of the person tracked by the other camera. This second set-up makes the idea unfeasible for this project but remained an idea we were pleased with. 

2D --> 3D (Completing the Message)
- Pixar short inspiration
- 3D world only seen through 2D shapes
- Completing the message based on the amount of participants interacting

A piece of film, a message, some sexy typography is displayed onto the screen but only inside the silhouette of a user being tracked by the cameras.

One version of this could have it be such that the more people in the frame the more complete the message/broadcast is.

The second version would have each person blob in the view frame linked to its own video or message, and how the things displayed inside them relate and contrast with those of other users could become part of the focus.  

Iat320 Assignment 1 Ideas:

Our Body Interface design team sat down together to brainstorm ideas for responsive environments. Some of the ideas that we discussed are detailed below.

Number 1:

Camera location placed above the space. The system analyzes people in the space as blobs, tracking the location and size of the blobs, with larger clusters of people comprising larger blobs.

Result Possibilities: Projector (also above) displays balls of light (generated in processing?) that cluster around the x,y position of the largest blobs. Surrounding and illuminating the areas with more people. An addition to this could be tracking motion as well as clusters. If a smaller blob is displaying a lot of motion they can pull light balls away from the other blobs.

Another element that can be part of the result is more sound based. In this alternative speakers are placed around the space being tracked by the camera. Rather than focusing the results on the areas with the largest clusters of people this version focuses on the least used. Dubbed by our team as “The Needy Room”, this result plays soft, lonely sobbing noises in the loneliest corners of the room that just wants to be used and loved.

Number 2: Invisible Friend

The camera is again overhead and the projector projects upon the floor. In this version individual people are tracked by the camera and a pair of glowing footprints follow alongside them when they are within the space. These footprints act as an invisible companion for children in the space, usually following the individual but sometimes running ahead and trying to get the user to chase the footprints and play games of tag.

Number 3: Colored blocks as environment controls.

The third idea tracks colored blocks or pillows in a space instead of tracking people. The analyzing system in this idea reacts to color keys and shapes and produces different environmental effects depending on whether particular color objects are present in a zone. A user in the environment could control the feel of his workspace by carrying in color blocks for head and dim light, or bringing a white-noise block in that tells the system to blot out sounds from outside the environment. Carrying in a black pillow might trigger soothing music, etc. The idea with the project is to take the tangible interface notions of experimental computer interfaces and apply it to the control of rooms and environments.

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