aram’s blog

My idea for final project goes back to very first idea from early this semester. ‘A clock for visual impaired personnel’, I came up with a ‘touchable’ clock idea with several sketches and prototyping model. Since I was not fully prepared for user-testing at that time, colleagues guess of ‘what time is it?’ went all wrong, even the prototype was broken by someone’s pressing too hard on the surface.

Yes, I learned a lot this much hard-way, this experience was even more worthy enough to immediately come up with next ‘obvious’ corrections such as durability, softness of fabric, and most importantly(from Amit), prototype should have ‘function’ that creator intend to show even if it’s hard to realize. - mine was to make people ‘feel’ the roller underneath the fabric.

Now I am researching the roller from data sheet of ‘massage chair’ manufacturer in order to figure out technical difficulties when it comes to ‘minimizing’ it to the size that can fit into palm-sized clock.

1) What are the three big problems that you expect to have during the production? How will they affect your timeline schedule? How do you intend on solving them up-front?

• Lack of electronic parts ordering/surveying experience
• Difficulty to trouble-shoot any coding issues - collaborating required
• Tendency to get stuck in fabrication - smart time-budgeting required

2) Which hardware does your project require? Do you have it all at hand? If not, complete an order of the equipment by next class.

• A clock. typical one. should be palm-size or slightly larger but not too gigantic.
• Roller. Possibly be customized. Survey required.
• DC motor (or Servo motor? )
• Power supply or battery bo

3) Provide a timeline of milestones to be acomplish each week, on these dates:

April 1: I missed this class due to my sickness.

April 15: At least one roller should be working with the cover fabric mounted on top of the clock.

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I got intrigued by Chuck Close’s painting from last class when Dan showed us several artists’ works for inspiration.

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After class, Amit and I talked about future direction of ‘what to do’.

What to do:

• divide each circled area to individual area between each finger
• survey ‘Reed Switch’ to elimiante hanging wires
• get Flash work in visual, having all individual area animated

So, I came up with really simple flash work that shows overall concept.
fivefingerfillet3.swf

1)how MDA applies to my fivefingerfillet game:

:Five finger fillet game consists of a physical platform that users could play by place their palm of hand(desirable one is ‘left’) down to table and attempt to stab the space between each finger back and forth with provided ‘knife’. The rule of this game is to stab all the spaces in order, starting from behind the thumb to after the little finger, and back again. With the spaces numbered 1 (behind the thumb) through 6 (after the little finger), the order would be as follows:

1-2-1-3-1-4-1-5-1-6-2-6-3-6-4-6-5-6-4-6-3-6-2-6-1 (repeats) : European rule

1-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2-1 (repeats) : American rule

Above two rules were found from wikipedia.org . Later, I would like to come up with my own rule.

Again, most famous scene of this game is from Alien 2′s cyborg performing knife skill in amazingly fast speed. My game, however, is not ‘harmful’ way because users will not perform with real knife or any sharp material. To avoid any bloody scene but to give a little sense of enjoying game with competition, I decided to form a scoring system dividing four circled-areas with different level. Also, time factor will be limited to certain degree, for example within one minute player should perform.

For aesthetics factor, I think users will be able to exercise a kind of ‘mimic war’ before whether engaging the real knife skill with real knife.  One might find this game rather ‘boring’ just because there are almost zero percent of being hurt so that he can’t be thrilled as much, this can be improved with synchronized Flash interface with scoring system embedded.

2) behavior modification:

Before I use iTunes with iPod, I barely thought seriously about how pirating music file affect the marketplace of music industry, and further more, why people do it and why not. Since I was visually fascinated with the ‘design’ aspect of iPod first, not knowing that the device should be hooked only with iTunes, nothing else, my mind wasn’t prepared to what is going to possibly happen if I attempt to sync it to other people’s music database. Yes, it did happened, not only once, couple of times - wiping out all music files in my iPod when I carelessly hooked it to one of my friends’ desktop hoping that I could ‘add’ more musics on the device.

As a result of this horrible experiences, now I became more alert about synchronizing ‘any’ data, as well as consider my digital files more ‘property’ things that I should care for. I think the argument between who’s right or wrong is meaningless at this point because people keep buying iPods regardless of Apple’s philosophy of digital contents right. However, it wouldn’t be a great thing to be injected any notion from one company side(this time it’s Apple), not learning or reasonably adapting it.

For healthier user experiences, I strongly suggest that the company should provide more freedom for users can make their own decision to ‘what’ to use as contents of the device.

Finally, I came up with several ideas of building One Button Game with Flash + IPAC. It almost felt ridiculous to spend almost two weeks squeezing my brain to just ‘think’ what I am going to create with deceptively simple game interface, but now I can think that time consuming was worthy to get back to our big point from this class - CONSTRAINT.

I’d like to skip writing about former ideas, however, I do want to point out that an attemp to steal Kacie’s brilliant idea - Chopstick - enourmously contributed to organize my scattered thoughts to one point. With chopstick, you could do not only ‘grabing’ food such as sushi but also could do something funny or stupid; poking foods or someone(?). This poking concept hatches another form of physical activity which is ’stabbing’ where I recall famous si-fi movie Aliens 2. In the movie, android Bishop shows his knife skill to one of his crew performing unbelievable speed of stabbing table with a sharp knife(and the guy who put his hand on table screams). This, obviously, is a game and I would like to make this ‘unharmful’ way using some soft materials instead of a deadly weapon.

The graphic above shows the overal idea of how this system will score. Red circle in the center indicates highest scoring area, then next three different circles do lower ones.

When it comes to physical interface, it wil simply consist of ground(circles) and input(stick = knife).

This is it. Simple..simple…simple thing. After I read the article “How to prototype a game in seven days”, I thought I found some definite direction to create my own game, however, no sooner had I approached the final output with IPAC, lots of coding(action script) problem occurred. Yes, I am stuck in Flash’s action world!

The plot of this game is so simple- toss the ball by using of spring which is moving up and down all the time.

wk6_gamedesign2edit.swf

My ‘plan’ was to concentrate more on finding ways to acquire text data from URL by using of XML. But I found it more difficult that I thought it would be, decided that I would pursuit that later on my final, not midterm.

The main idea is to subdivide 2D space to show the relative frequency of each word(from .txt file)in mapping of tree structures.

The code was built mainly from Visualizing Data (Ben Fry, O’reilly) Ch. 7 -Trees, Hierarchies, and Recursion, then I modified it to ‘my version’ of it.

After several trials of modifying the last code for midterm, I came up with some results with slightly different visuals.

Each sample shows different stroke and ellipse size. First three examples are from the same text file from the book-Mark Twain’s Following the Equator, depicting word usage in the book, and forth one’s visuals created from Korean-English dictionary from The Project Gutenberg. The fifth one shows the word usage in The War of the Worlds by H.G.Wells.

Since the text is only drawn if the size of the text is smaller than that of ellipse, for many times it shows ‘blank’ ellipses.

Follow-ups : After in-class presentation, I got lots of helpful feedback both from Dannie and classmates. Among those, I sorted out some very important opinions.

• The sequence of how those ellipses form in visual - For now, it is procedural, my processing code doesn’t contain ‘random’ value. Next time, I should think about how I ‘intentionally’ form whole fragments in visual more successfully.
• Using more dynamic data - Absolutely. This should be my goal for final project. Parsing data from XML should be studied. In fact, one of my classmates showed us the perfect example that I can refer to. Stored text data makes the visual very static.
• Make the visual less ‘arbitrary - Current code is done not by means of any underlying principle or logic, but by whim or some decidedly illogical formula. Using ‘baysean filter’ to build more logic first, then come up with better solution.

Source code here

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.