aram’s blog

I showed the result of what I have been working on to the class this morning. The purpose of this short presentation was to ask some problematic parts that I was engaging, however, it went to sort of critique which was a great plus to keep get this project going.

Dan’s reaction was that my work enables user to find hidden message from the image - Vitamin Water bottles.  For some reasons(I am still working on figuring this out.), when mouse moving it ’skips’ the label part of the bottles, so the result appears to be intentionally ‘conveying’ certain message.

Now I’ve changed 80pixel wide strip animated. When mouse stops, the colored bar part starts extends horizontally, then it goes back to where it was before if mouse starts moving again. (this was heavily relied on Young Sang’s assist in coding)

Next step and (probably) a goal would be making the colored bar doing image manipulation such as sharpen or blurring.

simple aram_dfc_key1.swf

This it it. As it says, it’s a simple keyboard interface made from Flash. Each button allows user to manipulate the object(currently it’s a mini robot character).

Somehow my creativity was limited this time to expand this project to next step which can join the IPAC interface as physical input. I played around several switches (see picture above) with IPAC first, realized that lack of idea still

For A2Z midterm project, I want to develop a short program to familiarize myself with how treemaps work. I’ve already exercised one simple code last week for class assignment, this could be developed further by putting more trial on it. - For example, simply changing String data from .txt to URL source data.

Some sample existing visuals from web are shown below:

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue4/turner.html

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/07/treemap-on-rails.html

http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~kerwin/treemap-survey.html

I chose to use ‘Vitamin Water‘ images for exercising current topics - saturation, noise, brightness and etc. - in C language.

Complete image of all different colored Vitamin Water bottles shows literally ‘color palette’, that’s why I thought it is great source to manipulate.

Here, I found one small problem: in the code, widow’s size is set to 640×480 so I should bring any image with exactly same size otherwise it’d be crooked as shown above. However, I decided NOT to change the window size in the code.

I found something! While size of stroked square remains the same, I managed to change actual navigation square’s size to 50×50 pixel.

SetRect(&Recti,mousepoint.h-50,mousepoint.v-50,mousepoint.h+50,mousepoint.v+50);

I changed each value from 100 to 50.

This is improvising from Danny’s tweaking - I only changed the value of saturation from 0 to 100.

if(x<mousepoint.h+10 && x>mousepoint.h-10){
ourSetPixel(x,y,R,R,R,bufferRowBytes,bufferBaseAddress);
}else{
ourSetPixel(x,y,R,0 ,0,bufferRowBytes,bufferBaseAddress);
}

Simply, switching around some values from the existing .c file and came up with above.

Modified part:
for(y=0;y<70;y++){                                                        // translation to lingo -  repeat with y = 0 to 70
ourFramedRect(mousepoint.h -y*60-count,
mousepoint.v -y*10-count,
mousepoint.h +y*60+count,
mousepoint.v +y*10+count);                                  // calling our method that draws Rects

This week, I made a simple treemap, referring mainly from the book Visualizing Data. All done is Processing, not Java.

Code sample available here.

First idea in order to enhance user experience with Samsung camera is merging multiple buttons in one long, two-way button. (see pictures below) Industry standard word would be ‘Rocker switch‘.

Before

After

That’d be all for altering ‘physical’ interface. With those two buttons, user can do exactly same navigation as before,by simply clicking either direction to get whatever function. Series of ‘what you can do’ with this button are:

1. Browsing each function by one-time click
2. Selecting any function by center click
3. Fast-image browsing by keep pressing (HOLD)the button

Next step is tweaking a little bit of LCD graphic interface removing the first row icons redundancy.

Application that I am going to use, I am thinking of using Processing or Flash unless some other apps will turn out to be more appropriate and easy to use.

This is ‘in process’ view of Flash window. In comparison to real NV15, my interface shows ‘menu’ first on LCD bottom row.

We, Laura, Sanjay and me, gathered together after class to talk more about project subject.

Laura came up with ‘cleaning’ subject:

• Why someone does cleaning a lot while the other doesn’t (at all?)
• What if we observe the house of the person who does cleaning for a living, whether it’d be (extremely) clean or not?

Group

Sanjay
Aram

We came up with a few ideas but could not narrow down on one:

Movies:
- movie as a product in theatres
- services for promotion
- movies on small screens such as psp,ipod, mobile,etc

Cleaning :
- sanitation
-recycling
-energy

Web Surfing
-different ways?
-different places

Bike Accident Device
-device to notify vehicles that a bike is coming and to becareful

Fashion
- customizing fashion , accessories, trends etc

On Sunday, I was being anxious for not getting anyone to observe and document an activity in the home. Originally, I was going to ask someone outside of my family boundary to do this assignment, luckily, my wife (right next to me at home) started doing something very interesting enough to catch my attention.

She was online, looking a number of grocery lists from Korean online shop - Hmart.com. Without asking her why, I began observing taking some pictures behind her(shutter sound disabled before action). No sooner had I got only couple shots from her, she noticed me and laughed, I had to ‘confess’ what I was doing and asked her ‘why’. The reason was that I ended up removing my car only couple weeks ago this made us uncomfortable to shop grocery in same volume that we used to. My house is 2.6 miles away from the nearest Korean grocery market, so we used our car to carry heavy loads. Since we removed the car, we had to shop grocery in very small volume from the other Korean market on 32nd st. NY. Then she found their website and decided to order mainly dry foods and some heavy items like rice and beverage.

While observing her ordering, I found following facts:

1. She began shopping without her own list. In the past when we shopped local, she always brought the list not to forget and not to ‘impulse buying’.
2. It took more time to search and ‘confirm’ online coupon to get $10 off than actual shopping time.
3. After she acquired coupon, she got confused how to properly ‘use’ it.
4. She accidentally reset the whole cart before checking out twice. This also impact the total running time to shop.
5. She turned on the radio while shopping. She seemed more relaxed than she was rushed in local store.
6. She had to concern total weight of the package. If it is over certain amount of weight, buyers should pay more. This made her going back to cart and remove some items such as canned foods.
7. She ended up losing patience getting organize the shopping list. After the ‘maximum weight’ issue came up, she just put some light weight snacks and two cup noodles in the cart.(randomly)

After placing order, she, again, began worrying about ‘next’ - receiving. The carrier that Hmart offers is UPS and there are chances that both of us are away home and they miss us, leaving the door tag. We have some issues with UPS before, that is no door tag was left and they stop attempting delivering so that we’re supposed to go distribute center and pick the package by ourselves. We fear that. Bottom line, online grocery shopping wasn’t a good idea.

- Now it’s Wednesday which is delivery day(UPS sent her ‘estimated shipping date’ as of today) -

Around 8pm, UPS delivered the package. It was too heavy for my wife to take onto the stairs, so I did it. She asked me a box cutter, then she started unpacking it.

onlineshop2.mov

1. She opened the box, looked at the packing list, and put it aside. While organizing all foods, she never looked it again to compare.
2. She grabbed bundled pack of rice punch cans first, opened the closet under the drawer and left the box opened in front of the closet.
3. She started moving other foods such as 5pks bundled ramen, cup ramens, tuna cans out of the box placing them around her.
4. She sorted out some Japanese snacks and put them over the box(in the picture, all snacks are placed ‘far from’ her position)
5. She started storing all other foods but rice punch cans. Interestingly, the rice punch box is in her way obviously, she doesn’t seem to be aware of it or feels subtle about it.
6. After organizing all ramens, she started storing rice punch cans.
7. She destroyed bubble cushions (used for protecting goods inside the box) and threw them away in garbage can.
8. She grabbed the heavies item - rice(15 lbs) and put it in the different closet.(under the sink)
9. She put the empty box of rice punch in the shipped box and put them in the stairway top(to throw them away later).

Conclusion: Time spent for online shopping - 48 mins   vs.   Time spent for receiving and organizing - 8 mins

My wife spent almost an hour to buy 18 items online and it took merely 10 minutes to ‘deal’ with them. Although she was going for getting $10 off coupon which is only one time benefit when you join the membership for the first time, I wondered if the total time spent was worthwhile. Beside, all food she ordered were mostly canned or instant food for long time use, we still need to shop rather fresh foods locally. Therefore, I’d like to say shopping grocery online couldn’t totally replace  shopping local with our own car.

In the process of unpacking, organizing, and storing in space(closet), she didn’t seem to take a moment to consider most optimized way of doing them, showing that she randomly grab whichever comes first in her hand.