Cinder - processing replacement

Its in C++ ( so fast ) but not so all encompassing.

Back to square one

Almost litrarally. With the failures over the weekened everyone is helping out getting the cyber tiles working. Image of Paul grooving one tile, Jeff has been 'Mr Electricity' too. We've gone for a bus design with a change of edge connectors.

Paul is talking to the dean about getting funding for more display research to help the faculty.

Cloud Disaster

New controller arrived to drive the cloud R had it up and running this morning.

Looks like the weight of the balls cause them to strip the gears. Very Very Low moment.

Me showing how the table worked.

Proff Yvonne Rogers doing the talk
Tables from above.

Whole thing Jeff and John in Background.

Live from DANA center

Absence of blogging for a bit while I was in a tizz getting the big table working. After much work managed to get everything sorted. I'm currently sitting in the DANA center now. Falling behind on teaching work. Mean while the table was working but now isn't.

I'm now sitting in the cafe waiting for the event to get going. The table is off line I'm now stuck under a bit of direct sun light which completely overwhelms the tables vision system.

Acrylic suppliers.

Good for table top or solar powered dryers.

http://www.barkston-online.co.uk/cuttingCalc.php?osCsid=da2f063265cbb0c5724b5eb3c0001fb2

continuing...

R is here and things are running along nicely with the floor. We are becoming Aurdiono central at the moment. Incidentally Aurduino have updated there stuff with a new bigger board and a faster CPU. Tinkerit are now selling an ethernet connection and someone has done a DHCP for the ethernet sheild

I've been bogged down with exam writing, Msc projects which look completely brain dead and a Phd first year viva. So not much help there. Hopefully Paul and I will have time to write up atrium study for next Thursday ( I think).

Simon has disappeared midst rumours of he getting a huge influx of assistance and full time PHD students. I didn't see much of him at Chi - He seemed to ignore the sessions completely.

Looking back for me Chi2009 was very reassuring. There is a 80% rejection rate but the stuff that gets in isn't that good. Or as one paper put it the chances of getting best paper were no different from randomness. Ended up with Tom R and Yvonne and Steve B playing if HCI person was a rock-star which rock-star would they be (seemed funny at the time). What else well I found CHI very friendly and I bumped into so many people I knew it was great. I really really want to put a paper in for next year.

Attrium meeting.

Floor stuff

To-do

take carpet tile to CHI.

Order carpet tiles.

Clouds

White stairs. Red lifts.

Higher up more , lower down less.

each little motor changes slightly random

Ideal - individual movement of lights.

short cut - frame with balls hanging down.

Sheep to email drawing of idea to Richie

Sussana to make some animations of carpet patterns + cloud patterns.

some carpet tiles with LEDs in nice.

http://picocool.com/architecture/lama-concepts-cell--led-carpet-1/

My first iPhone App!

I've worked my way through the complex process and I have managed to build my first iPhone app and got it going on my Mac. 

Wow ! 

Exhibition time.

From Tabletop

From Tabletop

From Tabletop

Paul Demoing.

From Tabletop

From Tabletop

My finger.

From Tabletop

Multi finger in action. 

From Tabletop

Quite a crowd. 

Well I managed to get quite a good sun/gravity demo working. By using the screen as the target I managed to get reactor vision to compensate for the spherical distortion of the screen and you get quite good registration. 

Down side was that Ricky kept stabbing the touch screen with both hands making large numbers of planets. Eventually you got a multi-threading error which meant I had to restart the process. I've fixed the bug bit it was an irritation while demoing I could have done with out (Didn't IBM have people going round the stands at exhibitions causing known bugs to appear on their competitors products - and they where rivals. Ricky does it for team mates). 

On the good news front looks like we have a gig at the Science Museum's Dana center. 

  

Mirror Mirror

We began fitting the new mirrors today and the image quality looked very good.

We kept trying things out to make it that bit better - centring, enlarging getting rid of rotations. During this, the mirror chipped while it fell off the glue on mount ( normally the glue should stick). Dave has gone off to re-stick the mirror over night things, we should be repeated over night. There is a back up emergency mirror - it might cause a few hassles but good enough to demo/show off/deveople with while a new mirror is ordered.

Generally I'm fairly positive about Wednesday.

Projector needs more mount points.

Netiom sensor

Well I managed to find the 7805 Voltage regulator and today (despite terrible headache) managed to get the electronics for the third sensor working. 

For some strange reason I'm getting strange signals popping out from the sensor (not timed not triggered not sure why.

 

With the PC from home and more wire I should get the server working in the meeting room on the far side of the building. With this I can begin upgrading the network to start talking directly to the main machine and so get the visualisations working

Google table idea

Thinking about things with google earth I realised that with apple script I could send move messages to GEarth from gestures which I have recognised from the table. 

So could do the whole Jeff Han zooming in but with the table. 

No hint of multi touch what would more than one person get from it. Nothing but good for demos.

Floor system.

Another couple of small set backs for the floor sensors. 

1. Paul went off with his old laptop - hard to set up the other sensors with out it.

2. I lost my key's today so I couldn't get into the lab - not a really bad day did other work but tomorrow is a big staff meeting followed by possible PHD meeting. This slows everything down.

3. I'm short of money other wise I would order the web based sensor stuff.

On the good news front I've put in 2 abstracts for the Space Syntax conference. 

More successes

Went to see the new table in preparation - pretty assume! Promised to drop the screw-thread over for Dave to work on. 

Paul put a conical diffuser on the reactor table this  and it works pretty well. New RV1.4 is very cool (does finger detection). We might use the left over 50 LEDs to form a disuse illuminator. 

Had a good discussion with Simon over/After lunch on grant writing and direction combination. 

Finally managed to get the floor pads in the floor (hard-work) but N didn't come in with PC as hoped. Can't start logging until tomorrow (but will run a test upstairs). 

Also found a link to some multi-touch software people. 

Problems problems problems (sun-spot)

I've been up on the bridge trying to get a radio signal under the floor from the nearest cable box ( next to meeting room on the other side of the bridge to the space next to the staircase.

 Basically no luck there. I can't get a radio signal under the floor (but can get over the floor) This would mean having to expose the sun boxes ( which I'm not to happy doing).  I spoke to the builder - he said there was no block under the floor ( under the door ) which you might have thought being a fire door. Perhaps he might have been wrong - I guess I must check. 

So what are the options now. 

1. Start recording rather than transmitting the data and try to retrieve the info later ( might be a good starting point but negates the interactive side of things). 

2. If there is a space under the door then run a very long USB cable from the sun-spot to a MacMini under the floor. This would solve two problems. First it would mean that the spot or aduino would get power as well as a way of sending info back. I ran the sun-spot last night and discovered that the sun-spot can basically last some of the night - I guess the radio is a power drain. I just checked and you can get 5m USB cables. This assumes you can run something under the door. Now where can I get a long stick?

Sun spots

The sunspot people came and gave a talk today. I managed to get a loan of 2 +base station. Very nice they have ZigBee + battery so all the communication is sorted out for you (neat). I'm going to build one to do the floor sensing job. I had a meeting with Yvonne about visualising both choice of route (walking/lift) AND had the measurement of building buzz.

Paul is going to sit and draw some tracks through the ground space. 

some progress

I've managed to get the sensor stuff working on the mac mini - the sound + vibration recording. 

Friday morning I'm going to take the stuff upstairs and try recording for a while. The big problem is how to share the data - How to get stuff from the wireless ouguest net to the intra net where I would store my database... 

This morning did demo of the ecology of devices to Paul. He like the demo.

I had a quick meeting with P+E about the form of the new table. After meeting with Y it looks like the table should be body hight. Something you could approach and use standing up. Looks like we should go for something that can double up as both an FTIR table and a tangible one.  

I'm going to measure up the current projector for the table rather than wait for a new one. I want to make sure the vidieo cams can be used for tangible reactivsion stuff too. 

Interesting thing about the meeting was that rather than becoming more specific things became more vague. Notice the flow of events, I'm trying to build something on a new table. I wanted to do something more tangible but we are not sure what could go on in the nexus that could be used in a tangible way. So now we have a dual use. The important aspects of the interaction are Y. She wants a circular or elliptical screen so no principle location. 

In truth we have 12 weeks to built a table,write test software, create an experiment and write it up for chi. P talks about doing something more longitudinal, but no one is sure what. At this moment my purpose is to create a boundary object. Something we can all talk about, focus the design process around.   

Y was more specific about doing a planning or tourist information thing. Something for the whole family to play with - planning a visit to MK or something. We also need something in the Nexus but what?

I still wonder if floorstickies might be more productive.  

The process is interesting - there are no clients with a problem. Very little we could apply to the standard process of human computer interaction to. Perhaps as a process this is something new. Technology creates new possibilities but how do turn those possibilities into new products. This is somewhere between the technology push and market pull. How do we identify a problem? Can we see problems when we don't have a solution?I'm not sure we can. Some perhaps, did we know we needed the internet before we had the intenet? I think we have to create solutions to see problems. 

Perhaps generally we can't - global warming is something where we see the problem with no apparent solution to guide our perception. For other things we use the affordances of the machine to guide our perceptions for what is a living difficencey.  

Could this be the start of a new strange processes.

Visit from City University

Just finished a demo to Dr Sara Jones and Professor Neil Maiden. They have a new Diamond touch table and where looking for people who had used them. 

I came in late ( working libary and lost time but Simon phoned me to remind me), but had a nice discussion about using tables/tangibles in the context of user interface elicitation. 

So this was the last in a row of three demos of the fishtable. 

Over lunch Neil mentioned having some contacts with web usability people and I mentioned my intreast in  finding click stream data AND eye tracking in games (apparently not done yet).

Mean while the wrong kind of silicon sheet was delivered - to thick and not squashy! Makes me wonder if working on the vision tracking is better approach. 

Next week are moving buildings!