Week 9 - Updating Sketch 2

For week 9, we continued to try to update our main patch/programming for our project. We've been having some difficulties getting everything to work because of the complexity of our concept that we want to incorporate. We help our main programmer where we can. We've been consistently testing our project and working with it.




We have been having difficulties in areas such as speed and triggering certain things to happen within a certain range. (i.e. Glove triggers monster at x).

We've been also getting other people to test it too, to record the experience of our project. We continue this week to update and put more details into our project. After we get the primary concept to function correctly in our project, we went on to try and add small details like speed, different animations, etc.



This has been a tough week since we aren't too familiar with the potential of Max MSP. We continue to strive to get our project done to the best of our ability.

Most of the presentation was done last week as we presented to Jinsil. This week I mainly just touched it up a bit in terms of design and added a little bit more detail to some of the slides.


Our presentation file can be found here:

http://www.sfu.ca/~ach3/sketchtwopresentation.pdf.pdf

The Max Patch can be found here:

http://www.sfu.ca/~yds2/iat320/SKETCH_TWO_Project.zip

Sketch Two - Continued

Last week was a very intense week for us as we continued to work on our Sketch Two. We met up and talked about what we wanted to get done and how we were going to do it and what each person was to do. Yosuke proceeded to handle the main programming and we helped where we could. We met up with Greg to ask for help on the programming on Friday.

As Yoshi was doing the programming, my main job was doing the research and the presentation. I researched on our concept and where it came from, what projects were similar to ours and what's been done out there in the world. We also researched on theories based on studies of real reaction time of people in general (drivers) and applied this to our concept.

A product, very similar to what we wanted to achieve was the EyeToy which I found quite interesting. They have a similar set up with a camera that's hooked onto the PS2. This camera tracks the users motion and sends the information to the PS2. Games that are made for the EyeToy lets users interact with objects on the screen/game. If you look at the picture below, it is of a girl using the EyeToy (the USB camera) to play with the game thats projected on the screen (TV). This is very similar to ours. We use colour tracking as a way to detect someone's movement. With this glove (our colour tracker), they use it to hit certain objects that are on the screen.


For the presentation, I included all that was required including concept research, theories, programming logic, pseudocode, flow chart, schematics, etc. I worked with Yoshi to correspond to the slides that talked about the coding, making sure that what I put on there, made sense with what Yoshi was doing and what our project programming consisted of.

We went to class prepared to show what we have. We didn't achieve what we wanted to, but hope to update it for next week for our real presentation. This week we presented Jinsil with our finished presentation and presented our work in progress of our programming to Greg. We had good feedback and hope to improve our Sketch Two for next week.

Reading Break Week - Sketch Two

After Sketch One was done, we were introduced to Sketch Two which was to work with cameras and Max MSP to create an environment interaction.

During this week, we worked with Max 5 in the labs to get familiar with the program and to learn some of its capabilities and functions. We have also formed teams for Sketch Two.

During the Reading Break, my team and I have begun to brainstorm what we wanted to do for this project. We have had a few ideas and concepts. We didn't want to create something that would trigger just an object, but further push this idea. A few concepts that we came up with were:

1. Having the user interact with an environmental map. Since we're Super Mario fans, we wanted to create a Super Mario environment with pipes, mushrooms, monsters that could be interactive when we put our hands on the object triggering an event to occur.

2. Second, was a concept similar to the breath analyzer and bubble concept that was talked about in class. This was a very vague concept idea that we thought about but didn't really elaborate on this.

3. Our third concept was the concept game of Whack-A-Mole. Everyone has played whack-a-mole or is familiar with this game. It can be played in arcades, on the computer, etc. It's a game where moles pop up from holes and you whack it with a hammer. We wanted to create this, but in terms of an interactive environment. We all agreed on this concept after brainstorming for awhile and this was the one we wanted to produce.

With this concept in mind, we wanted to put this concept into Max 5 where we use a camera to show the map of the moles and the player interacting with it. On the patch will be pixels of pipes, the background and the moles coming out. We have thought about using a glove to use to track the motion (color tracking) to make this effective. The user will wear the glove to play the game. We have to program it so the distance between the gloves and the point of interaction will work. If the mole is at a certain coordinate, it will trigger a point in the game for the user and if the mole is not in that area, nothing will happen and no points will be recorded.

We took this idea and talked to Greg during our lab this Wednesday, he liked the idea but wanted to challenge us and push this project further. He gave us the idea of having more animals (i.e. Elephant, Rabbit) and depending on these types of animals, you must have a certain speed to gain points. So a rabbit, you can touch it at a slow speed because its a small animal, but if its an elephant, you have to go much faster (giving more strength) because its a huge animal. This challenges our initial idea a bit more because now we would have to figure out how to change the speed and getting the glove (color tracking) to track each object with our glove. Our biggest challenge is to program the mole to record the point. After achieving that goal, all we need to do is duplicate and change the speed of things.

Week 4 - Continuation of Sketch One Assignment

This week, we continued to work on our Sketch One Assignment. We had most of our assignment done from last week, so the only thing we had left to do was complete the implementation of the backpack with our pressure sensors and testing to see if it was correct. We also had to tweak the numbers to fit the weight being distributed in the backpack.

When working on the programming, Arduino part of our project, we programmed the Arduino so the four pressure sensors would sense the weight being distributed. If a person was wearing the backpack in the wrong way (i.e. wearing it too low or one strap on the shoulder), the red LED light would light up.

There are a total of 5 LED lights on the backpack. We programmed it so that the green would light up first, then yellow and then red. So as a person puts more weight into the backpack, the lights will light up accordingly to the numbers that we put in for the programming. We based our programming on the average person of 140 lbs. We used this number from the researched we did and how much the average person can carry (around 22lbs).


For the implementation part of our project, we used tape to put over the conductive thread so it wouldn't touch the other threads conducting. We sowed the thread into the two straps of the backpack and slipped it inside. The Arduino board ideally will be put inside the backpack. We hooked up the Arduino board to each of the LED threads so it would light up accordingly. We sowed each thread carefully, away from each other to the four sensors to the Arduino board. We also used conductive tape where needed. We used black tape to keep some of the thread in place as well.


In our presentation for Sketch One, we included a description of our concept, how it is used and its experience. In the next slide, we talked about concept research behind our project and also techical research (anti-static foam, inspiration from instructables site and existing/related projects). Some of the research we talked about was Brandon Macias' study on shoulder/backpack pain with children, the Carlie Backpack and the DC backpack. After the presentation was made, we finalized everything and prepared the presentation for each of us.

The presentation can be seen here:
http://www.sfu.ca/~ach3/320presentation.pdf