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Archive for the ‘Interaction Design’ Category

Giu
22

Smile! This plant wants to take a selfie with you

arduino, Arduino Yún, CIID, diy, Exhibition, facebook, Featured, Interaction Design, projects, selfie, servo, social media, Yun Commenti disabilitati su Smile! This plant wants to take a selfie with you 

plant_post

Selfie Plant is an interactive installation taking pictures of itself using Arduino Yún, Facebook Graph APIs and then uploads them to Facebook. It was developed by a group of students at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design during “The secret life of objects” course held also by Arduino.cc team. The final prototype was placed in the exhibition of the school, to see the interaction of the audience with it and you can see the result on Facebook.

facebookselfie

The Selfie Plant is an attempt to provoke some thoughts above genre of expression. The Selfie Plant expresses itself in the form of nice-looking selfies, which it clicks according to its mood, weather or occasion. It mimics human behaviour, by giving it’s best pose and adjusting the camera angle to take the perfect selfie.

 

In the documentation on Github you can find all the details of the project composed by an Arduino Yún, controlling 2 servo motors and adjusting the positions of the plant and the camera stick; a python script (facebook.py) which communicates with Facebook’s graph API to post the captured photos on plant’s Facebook profile. In addition you’ll need also a LED Matrix, a Bread Board and 5 Volt Battery.

Here’s a preview of the diagram:

selfiediagram

 

Dic
09

Experiencing the solar flux with an interactive installation

arduino, Featured, Interaction Design, LED, mega, solar Commenti disabilitati su Experiencing the solar flux with an interactive installation 

IMG_67962

Dmitry Morozov shared with us a new interactive installation called  Solarman at the Polytech Museum in Moscow. 2014 and It’s a work he created with Julia Borovaya and Edward Rakhmanov using 64 ultra bright LEDs, 12-channel sound system and 8 electrical nerve stimulation electrodes controlled by Arduino Mega :

Data on power of X-radiation flux from the Sun is received in real time from the satellite GOES15 which is tracking solar activity. It is being converted into streams of sound, light and electric discharges, thus allowing a spectator to experience in more intensive and evident way the influence of the main luminary of the solar system.

The data, which is measured in watts per square meter, come with a frequency of once per minute. A special computer algorithm transforms it in sound waves, distributed by 12 channels in the space. The radiation power directly controls the height of tones and spectral changes in the sound. The speed of sound displacement in the space is also dependent on these parameters. Light is generated by algorithmic transformation of X-ray emission into physical modeling of light particles, which also affect the muscle stimulators in the chair to produce weak electric discharges.

Check the video below to see the power of the sun:

Ott
21

Experience sound multi-sensorially with Ocho Tonos

ADK, arduino, etextile, Featured, Interaction Design, mega, Mega ADK, sound Commenti disabilitati su Experience sound multi-sensorially with Ocho Tonos 

ochotonos

Some of you may have noticed that words like rhythm, texture, pattern, can be used both to describe fabrics, as well as sound. Focused on building an interface as a whole, using mostly textiles, OCHO TONOS invites the user to interact through touch, and experience sound in a multi-sensorial way. Ocho Tonos is an interactive installation by EJTech duo (Esteban de la Torre and Judit Eszter Kárpáti) I met last July during etextile summer camp while they were working on this experimental textile interface for tactile/sonic interaction by means of tangibles:

Exploring the relation between sound and textile and experimenting with the boundaries of our senses whilst changing the way we perceive fabric, surfaces and their manifestation as sound. Recontextualizing our tactile interaction with textile acting as an interface, where each element triggers, affects and modifies the generated sound’s properties. Creating a soundscape through sensor technology enticing audiophiles to interact and explore with reactive textile elements.The nexus of the body, the senses and technology.
OCHO TONOS is a symbiosis of the unique hand-crafted traditional textile techniques and the immaterial digital media.

Thanks to Arduino Mega ADK , all inputs coming from the touch of the user on the soft sensors are translated into a digital platform, parsed and filtered through MaxMSP, in order to control the generation of a soundscape in Ableton Live.

Ocho Tonos was chopped, spiced and cooked at Kitchen Budapest. Sounds used are samples from the working machinery at  TextielLab.

Set
23

Yes, The Drink Up Fountain is talking to you!

arduino, education, Featured, fountain, Interaction Design, mega, water Commenti disabilitati su Yes, The Drink Up Fountain is talking to you! 

drinkupfountain

The Drink Up Fountain is project created in September 2014 by YesYesNo Interactive studio in collaboration with Partnership for a Healthier America’s Honorary Chair – First Lady Michelle Obama, and Y&R New York, VML New York creative agencies, dedicated to encouraging people to drink more water more often: “You are what you drink, and when you drink water you drink up!”

The Fountain runs on Arduino Mega  and

dispenses entertaining greetings and compliments intended to entice the drinker to continue sipping. When a drinker’s lips touch the water, the fountain “talks,” completing a circuit and activating speakers. When the drinker pulls his or her head away and stops drinking, the circuit breaks and the fountain stops talking. With hidden cameras set up, Drink Up caught unsuspecting individuals using the fountain in New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge Park

DrinkUp_Fountain_2
Take a look at the video to see how the fountain interacts the people:

Set
10

Put out a candle with the power of your mind

arduino, brain, candle, Exhibition, Featured, Interaction Design, Waves Commenti disabilitati su Put out a candle with the power of your mind 

Trataka

Trataka” by Alessio Chierico is an interactive installation controlled by Arduino and based on a brain-computer interface. It was exhibited at Ars Electronica last week. When a visitor totally relaxes and focuses, the candle magically extinguishes:

Trataka is a Sanskrit term which means “to look” or “to gaze” and it refers to a meditation technique. This practice consists in concentrate the attention in a small object, or more commonly in a flame. In meditation, this technique is used to stimulate the ajna chakra: a point located in correspondence of the brain. According to the Hindu tradition, this chakra is one of the six main centers of vital energy, and it is considered as the eye of the intuition and the intellect.

This installation is composed by a brain-computer interface that detect the brain waves and defines parameters like the level of attention. Wearing this device, the user is invited to concentrate his attention on a flame placed in front of him. The level of attention detected by this system, controls an air flow located under the flame: higher level corresponds with a more intense air flow. The interaction process aims to the user engagement for increase his attention in order to put the flame out. This will happen when the highest level of attention is reached: the air flow become strong enough to extinguish the flame.

 

Mag
12

Creating colourful clouds of light

arduino, breathing, inspiration, installation, Interaction Design, light Commenti disabilitati su Creating colourful clouds of light 

breathingcloud

Arduino user SicLeung is part of Do Interactive, an interactive design team based in Hong Kong. He sent us a video about his experimental installation at Hong Kong Poly University – School of Design and exploring unusual ways of activating light:

Mar
08

Arduino driven floating black ball is the creepiest/coolest thing around

arduino, inspiration, Interaction Design Commenti disabilitati su Arduino driven floating black ball is the creepiest/coolest thing around 

SPace Replay

Space Replay is a project by Francesco Tacchini, a Royal College of Art grad student, and Julinka Ebhardt and Will Yates-Johnson of Design Products:

A hovering object that explores and manipulates transitional public spaces with particular acoustic properties. By constantly recording and replaying these ambient sounds, the levitating sphere produces a delayed echo of human activity.

SpaceReplay

It’s equipped with a battery-powered Arduino — an Adafruit Wave Shield  in order to record and playback audio on-the-fly through  a small speaker. In the video below you can see how it moves around:

It actually reminds me of Rover, the large white inflatable balloon protagonist  of  the 60s sci-fi series the Prisoner! What do you think?

Feb
10

Making is Best When it’s Done Together

around the world, community, Interaction Design, Ivrea, MAKE Magazine, Maker Faire, MakerFaire Commenti disabilitati su Making is Best When it’s Done Together 

makingtogether_massimo

(originally posted on Makezine)

 

This month I’d like to talk about the idea of making together and what it means for Arduino. The whole idea of being a maker involves concepts of collaboration, community, and working with other people. It’s very hard to be a maker and be by yourself locked in a room or even in a lab. It’s really something that involves a lot of collaborations at different levels.

Many people today know what Arduino is, but very few know about two projects I did before Arduino. They were my first attempts to solve the problems my students had in prototyping with electronics. I consider them “creative failures.” As makers, we welcome failure as a way to understand how to do it better the next time.

Those initial projects I prototyped were not working so well because the technology was not really good but mostly because when I developed these things I did them by myself. I didn’t involve other people and I was very inefficient in trying to get them to work properly. They solved a number of problems my students had, but they didn’t really get a lot of momentum.

Ten years ago I started teaching at Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea (unfortunately it doesn’t exist anymore) where the Olivetti company used to be. In the picture below you can see their building and it’s not hard to notice it was created with a “design” approach. Olivetti was one of the first companies in the world to really apply design to everything: from their typewriters, to their buildings and to their posters, etc. Mr. Olivetti had that idea factories should have paintings on the walls because workers should be surrounded by beauty and knowledge. It was part of a bigger approach putting people at the center. It was in this context at the institute where we developed a number of projects before we came out with Arduino in the shape you know it now.

makingtogether_ivrea

If you peel back the surface, underneath Arduino project you can find a lot of collaboration. On one side you can see a selection of pretty amazing open source software contributing to what Arduino has become. I’m talking about GCC, processing, wiring, AVR, and all the other contributions from the community. On the other side, I started to involve specific people.

I met David Cuartielles when he was researching in Ivrea and we started to talk about things we wanted to see in the platform to help our students getting started with electronics. Slowly we also got in touch with other people: Tom Igoe, a professor at ITP in New York with great experience; David Mellis, an amazing software developer who joined Ivrea from MIT; and Gianluca Martino, an electronics engineer who knows every company involved in electronics in the area. He’s now taking care of the manufacturing.

I gathered all these people one-by-one because we wanted to make an open project based on collaboration. All the founders brought their own experience into Arduino and later what became really important was the Arduino community. At the moment there is a community much larger than number of official Arduino boards we have sold. There are more than 180,000 people subscribed to the forum and more than 4 million monthly page views to the website with visitors spending about five minutes on each visit.

Arduino was born out of different contributions and it taught us to follow this path with most of our products. We started collaborating with other people and companies of the open source community, extending our role as makers into ideas and projects becoming products. Recently, we told you the story of the Arduino robot and an example of collaboration.

For example, some years ago, with Adafruit we developed the Arduino Micro packing all of the power of the Arduino Leonardo in a smaller board. We met with Limor and Phil sharing a lot of ideas and more projects are coming up in the next months.

At some point we also worked with Telefonica, a global mobile operator, to make the Arduino Gsm Shield. The technology of the shield is basic but we worked really hard to develop the API to use the module very easily. What’s important about these collaborations is not the technology but other things like lowering the barriers to access a sim card and allowing people to activate it very simply, just with a credit card. The value we created was about opening up a collaboration and making a big company like Telefonica aware of the impact of a product like this in the maker community.

A similar thing, but with a smaller company, happened for Arduino Yún. DogHunter, based in Taiwan, designed the board together with us. The factory we usually work with in Europe didn’t have the experience to work with wi-fi technology so we teamed up with a factory in Taiwan which had an experience with millions of access points. Arduino Yún became the first official board made in Asia.

In the first half of 2014 we are going to release the Arduino TRE. It’s a combination of a Beaglebone and an Arduino plus a number of things designed to make it very convenient for people to get started. We worked with Texas Instruments and especially Beagleboard, which shares with us a series of commitments to open source hardware and similar goals and ideas, like the desire for simplicity and ease of use.

Once again we realized how easier it is to find someone who can give you a cheaper piece of hardware, but in the long run, even if it’s harder to find someone who shares the same set of values, it’s well worth it.

We believe in the open source movement and everyone should be really aware that it can develop successfully if everyone takes from it, but especially if people and companies contribute back. That’s why it’s important to highlight who creates a positive loop and nurture knowledge sharing and collaboration.

makingtogether_mfrome

Even if there is the perception the maker movement is much more U.S.-centric, with a lot of visibility for American makers, events, and companies, we believed that we could do something to improve the relations among the movement here in Europe and activate more positive loops.

We realized that one of the issues was about language. Many European makers are very active in their local community, but they don’t Speak English. That’s why we decided to invest time and resources to create an European Maker Faire in Rome, inviting people from all over the continent. It was not easy to organize it, but I can say that it was an incredible success with more than 35,000 participants. It proved that in Europe people want to get together, know each other and cross the boundaries of the over 27 countries with different languages.

Maker Faire is not an event that has to do strictly with people making hardware. For me it’s much more important because it opens up channels of communication between makers and the concept of making together. We are happy to show what makers can do and how they could collaborate toward a future of great open source projects and, later, bringing benefit to communities around the world.

Ott
16

Making noise with Arduino- Workshop at IDEO NYC

arduino, ideo, Interaction Design, nyc, sound, video, Workshops Commenti disabilitati su Making noise with Arduino- Workshop at IDEO NYC 

arduinonoise

(originally posted on Makezine)

Dario Buzzini and I have been friends since we met at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea several years ago. Ever since, we have worked together on interaction design projects for different clients. While visiting NYC for World Maker Faire last month, we organized a free open workshop for 25 participants at the IDEO NYC office (where Dario works)  focused on creating sounds and music.

Make Some Noise” was a short, one-day workshop about Arduino where we explored the topic of sound and it was aimed at complete beginners with no experience. To simplify the structure of the workshop we started with hands-on experiments composed by a quick set of exercises to enable the participants to understand the basics and, later on, to start exploring pitch, frequency, tone, and multiple effects—with quite curious results (see videos below)!

 

 

To make things even easier, we focused only on one type of output  showing how you can relate that output with several types of input, like different sensors. We started, as usual, blinking a LED and then learned how a speaker clicks the same way an LED blinks: if you do it fast enough you can make a sound, if you do it at a specific speed you can make a note, and if you look up at all the frequencies associated with all the notes you can make scales.

After some testing, students were able to create noises, sounds, control them through slide sensors, buttons, potentiometers. At the end, as a fun exercise we used a piece of open source software that one of the Arduino users put on the Arduino Playground, which turns the Arduino into an eight-oscillator synthesizer that can use any piece of metal as a sensor. We then connected eight soda cans with an Arduino and a speaker. It played them as if it was a church organ!

Design and technology have, once again, come together to redefine, shape, and explore new experiences through simple, approachable tools.

Ott
15

Interactive soft puppets to connect kids and parents

education, Interaction Design, Kids, puppets Commenti disabilitati su Interactive soft puppets to connect kids and parents 

footprint

Footprints is a network of interactive soft puppets for creating and sharing illustrated stories between parents and children.

The project, prototyped with Arduino by italian designer Simone Capano, involves parents into their children’s everyday lives, by sharing an intimate moments like telling a story but it could also connect the world of school with the world families  when data are collected into a cloud.

footprints

How does it work?

  • The communication process is started by the parent. With the smartphone the parent can record a little vocal story, add some images proposed by Footprints about the story he has just told, like the story’s characters or other objects related to it. After he can send it all to the child’s puppet.
  • At school, the child can listen to the story by placing the puppet on the tablet and play with the images he has received to build a drawing about the story.
  • Once the drawing is complete, Footprints send it back to the parent who can track the path of the stories shared with his child through the smartphone app which, in time, collects and documents all the drawings.

Take a look at the video to see it in action:

 

 



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