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.