The electronic design incorporates three double H-bridge chips, an Arduino and hacking directly into the robot arm kit’s motors.

The user operates the base of the arm by twisting their wrist left or right, moves the lower motor which lifts the arm by raising their wrist and lowering their wrist to lower the arm. The middle two motors are controlled by the user’s middle finger and the ring finger by bending them into the palm. Moving the finger into the palm a little raises the arms joints on these two motors while bending them fully lowers the arms joints. The index finger operates the claw in a similar way, bending the finger a little closes the claw and fully bending it opens it. Pushing the safety switch illuminates the light on on the claw of the arm.

From the perceived usage while on display, most people go through a small learning curve  to operate the arm before they are able to lift a marker (not a set objective, but something everyone attempted to do). Many users commented on how they liked the interaction, noting that they never looked at their glove, only the arm it’s self, saying they enjoyed the sensation of becoming almost cyborg.

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Multitasking is a complex, albeit common, human activity where we try to keep tabs on processes, information and life its self. Yet according to Christine Rosen from The New Atlantis, there is neuroscience and anecdotal evidence that multitasking is a myth. We are continually shifting our primary conscience attention from one thing to another while exercising judgement on what needs our attention the most and monitoring all the background information. There is a mental state that was christened CPA (continual partial attention) by Linda Stone, a former Apple and Microsoft executive who says we are “constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing” and warns “we have stretched our attention bandwidth to its upper limits. We think that if technology has a lot of bandwidth then we do, too.”

Although the affect of information overload, multitasking and our capacity to handle lots of information is under continual debate, the way we interact with data has been largely visually and/or auditory based. A haptic medium could be a route to beat unintended attention deficits created already by the latest gadgets and services. In this paper we present a haptic device in the rather new field of Human Interface Design for creative exploration.

Our approach

The introduction and the study of a haptic feedback medium suggests the existence of the medium itself. We built a loose platform which is constituted by hardware and software on which we can built different applications that are suggestive on the directions that the medium would take. So we built a haptic harness.

The Hapti Harness consists of an arrangement of straps made of elastic soft material aiming in to maximising the comfort. The basic set up incorporates a strap around the waist (“the belt”), an arrangement of a V shape strap hooked on the front side of the belt and running horizontally along the torso onto the back side of the belt. An extra strap is placed around the chest, and all the vibration units are attached on the straps using Velcro patches which allows for flexibility of placement.

The used hardware
- 22 vibrating motors 2.5~3.8 V@70mA, at 200 Hz.
- 2-axis magneto-resistive sensors compass module; HMC652
- 32 channel GPS module; LS20031
- 2 TLC5930 chips
- 1 arduino Flo
- 2 XBees 1mW Wire Antenna
- 1 UItrasonic sensor
- 2 infrared proximity sensors
- Polymer Lithium Ion Battery – 2000mAh
- 4 AA 1.5V batteries

At present, a simple API is all that is required to interact with the harness.  Current implementations such us the HAML (Haptic Application Markup Language) are indicating the path which needs to be taken for universal development to take place. It would be ideal if HAML was covering the Hapti-Harness setup, but as yet, it mainly deals with haptics as feedback devices mainly engaged in tele-presence field work or virtual reality 3D environments, with a fair degree of complexity. The Hapti-Harness project is a simpler system and could be included as a part of HAML in the future, as this could become the standard which goes on to allow universal adoption of haptics to all other future haptic technological systems.

Prototype testing

Hapti-Harness prototype testing from Matt Jarvis on Vimeo.

This project wouldn’t have been possible without the Arduino community (who have built such an accessible electronic prototyping platform), SparkFun (for getting most components in one place a wonderful documentation of hobby projects) Cycling74 (for the MAX/MSP 1software) and Apple (for nice, working computers). Thanks to Grumpy_Mike (for the electronics support), Mikal Hart (for the Ardunio NSS, Flash and TinyGPS libraries), Maarten Lamers (for support with the GPS).

Special thanks must go to the following people who have provided various assistance, help, advice and motivation: Veneta Andersen, Stijn Belle, Clara Blad, Ghislaine Boddington, Arthur Elsenaar, Stelios Giannoulis, Richard Hardstone, Firat Kara, Dunya Kirkali, Zane Kripe, Eero Mella-Aho, Zameer Razack, Simon Skinner, Heike Sperber, Linda Stone, Taconis Stolk, Lieven Van Velthoven.

We will soon release all the information open source on it’s own website. Watch this space

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They’re great when listening to popular Dutch electro music!

You can download all 10 here: http://www.mattjarvis.co.uk/downloads/MMinimalist_visualizers.zip

To install (Mac OS X):

1) unzip the file and put them in your /Library/Compositions folder.

2) Open iTunes (quit and restart if it was open)

3) Select a visualizer from View -> Visualizers

Start the visualizer!

Please let me know what you think!

Enjoy!

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Sound Space Interaction 2009

MAX/MSP is a great application to build an interactive sound environment. When we realised how we could connect to external inputs to MAX MSP from a Wii-mote, we got quite excited about building an interactive game using just sound in a space.

Our plan was to build a ‘lightsaber’ purely in sound. We researched how the sound designer Ben Burtt originally build the saber sounds for the hit film series ‘Star Wars’. The lightsaber is a sword with a column of brightly coloured energy in the place of a metal blade. We learned that the sound for the device, created in the 1970s, was made with totally analogue technology from source sounds such as the static of an un-tuned television and replayed though a speaker, then re-recorded live with feedback from microphone waved around in from of the speaker.

The available data provided by the Wii-mote produces values for the yaw, pitch, roll, acceleration and it has an extra infra-red camera. This meant we could not detect values for if the Wii-mote was swung around 360 degrees, only 270. In trying to cobat this limitation we tried using the built in infra-red detection, which proved much more complicated and was using up too much time whilst not really enhancing of the experience, and so decided to create the game limited to the 270 degree angle.

Using Masayuki Akamatsu’s aka.wiiremote object, we took in the values from the Wii remote and mapped the panning and saber sound to a quadraphonic audio set up though a MUTO device. (Careful here as it seems some of the drivers can cause problems, both on Mac OS and windows systems- personally I went though no less than 12 kernel panics after installing the MOTU drivers, in part I think because of the previously installed soundflower software from Cycling 74).

Our original plan was to use 2 of the sabers in 2 rooms so you could fight a ‘fight with the invisible enemy’, however we couldn’t agree a good way on how the fight could be won or lost in this scenario and so came up with an alternative and more exciting proposition relating to when the Jedi Knights are in training. In the story, the ‘younglings’ (children born with strong sensitivity to the Force) are trained to use their light-sabers blindfolded, so they should use ‘the force’ to engage with small laser-firing drones sending out small ‘lightly painful’ laser beam to the subject which was either absorbed or reflected by the light saber.

This presented an interesting proposition to build a sound-based laser battle ground, with lasers flying in from any direction and be deflected by the soundsaber we’d built. To do this we used a quadraphonic 2D speaker set up and placed sounds between them .We used the Freeverb~ object to position the saber sound and the lasers.

The objective was to build a 1 or 2 player game in a single or pair of rooms, which meant there needed to be a competitive element in the game. This challenge resulted in a the idea of an audio representation of a haze, where the player would  have increasing difficulty in locating where the laser sounds were originating from. In a single room set-up this means for every miss there would be an increase in a futuristic noise sound, in keeping with the laser and saber sounds. In a dual room set-up every hit would increase the noise sound to the other room, making it more difficult for your opponent to detect the incoming laser sounds.

The resulting project works very well in a single room and with further development could be refined much more to give an engaging sonic battle experience. Next steps would include attempting to build the project in a 3D sound environment and further define the sound design to compensate to different sizes of playing fields and work on other solutions for turning 360 degress in the room.

If you would like to set up yourself or play with the patches, you can download the source here.

Enjoy!

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Seascape features a series of gradually unfolding digital seascapes created using imagery captured in real time by webcams installed at five key vantage points along the south coast between Margate and Portsmouth. The cameras are positioned at various seafront locations in Margate, Folkstone, Bexhill, Pagham, and Stokes Bay.

Stokes bay 29/03/09 13:27

Pagham 29/03/09 13:26

Bexhill-on-sea 29/03/09 13:25

Folkstone 29/03/09 13:26

Margate 29/03/09 13:26

Susan Collins’ Seascape, from East to West.

Each reveal in real-time an image being constructed live from the webcams installed at the five locations across the South East coast. Continually collecting this data – from top to bottom and left to right in horizontal bands – these images are constantly generated and renewed pixel by pixel in front of the viewer.

To coincide with the exhibition, a publication on the Seascape project will be produced by Film and Video Umbrella. The book will feature newly commissioned essays by Sean Cubitt and Nicholas Alfrey and include an extensive colour plate section of archive seascape images. To order a copy email books@fvu.co.uk

Seascape is commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and the De La Warr Pavilion and is supported by Arts Council England and the Art and Humanities Research Council. The project would not have been possible without a large number or organisations and individuals:

Leas Cliff Hall (Folkestone), Pebble Beach Café (Stokes Bay), Slade Centre for Electronic Media, Slade Digital Print Studio, Information Systems (University College London), OK-RM (Oliver Knight & Rory McGrath) with Electronest (Jerome Rigaud & Pierre Schmidt), Nicholas Alfrey, Alex Baker, Adrian Barker, Martin John Callanan, Ian Cartwright, Sean Cubitt, Michael Duffy, Luci and Simon Eyers, Tim Head, Matthew Jarvis, James Keith, Stephen Levine, Pat Seggery, Simon Schofield, Fiona Sherriff, Graham and Antje Southern, Jon Thomson, Mike and Jane Windsor.

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Try it!

http://www.mattjarvis.co.uk/mms/Web/

Source code available on request.

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I decided to conduct some research.

My paper is here: http://www.mattjarvis.co.uk/presentations/Creative Research (Matthew & Mario).pdf

Here are the results:

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 This is the original edit:

These guys are working on it too:
http://compare-everywhere.com/

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Please leave your comments here!

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Graphic by Casper Schipper

Do people work better together or alone?

We have created a puzzle based interactive installation to explore the possibilities of this question. The simple ‘Untangle’ game has been around for years as a small game made by computer scientists which uses various algorithms to search for intersections between nodes. It has a number of nodes connected by lines and the aim of the game is to move the nodes, along with the lines connecting them so that no line crosses over another. As the game goes up in levels the more intersections there are and the more complex the puzzle becomes to solve. We have taken a different approach to interacting with the game, instead of one person moving one node at once, we allow multiple players to move many nodes at the same time.

Method

We created a playing field and used motion recognition system to track ‘blobs’ as people entering the area. On this playing field we project our puzzle of nodes and lines ready to be solved. We created pre-existing set levels, and therefore data of the number of players and time it takes to solve the puzzle can be compared and our results will show us how well people work together, along with exploring some of the latest technological advances in image recognition and interactive pervasive gaming environments. It was important to us that the players didn’t have to do anything special in order to interact with our installation.

Set up

Simply walking on to the playing field is all we want our participants to do, yet provide these protagonists with a rich, immersive and challenging experience as we collect the data for this research. We placed a webcam above our playing field and used blob detection in the c# programming environment which passed information to an Adobe Flash application which is the game engine. Another Flash application was created to display the high scores though a separate projection on the wall.

Download Installation Requirements here

What do people need to do?

People need to solve a puzzle game. Depending on the number of players, this game can be played by one up to eight players simultaneously. The goal of the game is to solve a untangle puzzle as quick as possible; the less time it takes to complete the game, the higher the score will be. The game is collaborative: this means all players will have to team up in order to solve the puzzle.

Image by Casper Schipper

The game is to be played physically. People control the game by moving around in a physical space. The game consists of a number of nodes, each connected to other nodes by at least two lines. Players can move the nodes around freely, aiming to remove all intersections between these lines. The moment no intersecting lines remain, the puzzle is solved and the game is finished.

Check out Casper’s website for other projects here.

Subscribe to Lieven’s YouTube account to see the other great projects he’s working on here.

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Creativity is king here, and I was lucky enough to work with one of the most creative minds of the world, Martin Sastre. Imagine Lady Diana Spencer, who is still alive and living in Uruguay, going about her business and having a nice normal life while we are all mourning what she stood for.

Make of this what you will, the YouTube discussions continue…

There is a higher quality version here. (Requires Quicktime)

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