Both BlueWay, the Bluetooth people tracking system and Sketch & Share, the interactive networked drawing tool, were presented in ITP’s Spring Show for 2006. Sketch & Share was featured in Pixelsumo and BlueWay got plugged in Cool Hunting and on the blog Pasta & Vinegar.
A woman I talked to was very excited about using BlueWay at her nightclub. She envisions registering guests as they wait in line outside, then displaying their photos on a large projection in the club. If you like the way someone looks, then dance your way over to their location. I also chatted with a guy from New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Apparently MOMA is very interested in indoor location-based services like BlueWay. I personally think something using ZigBee embedded in a ticket might work even better than Bluetooth. I’ll be investigating such low-bandwidth, low power systems in the Fall of this year.
Thesis Genius is a follow-up to my Social Genius name-learning game. Every year, graduating ITP students deliver their Masters thesis during Thesis Week. The Thesis Genius game created a entertaining method for learning and remembering which student worked on which thesis project. It was installed on a plasma screen in the lobby for several weeks leading up to the end of the semester. Hundreds of students played thousands of games and got to know each other’s work. This solidified community and social networks before the graduates and their newly minted Masters degrees launched themselves out into Manhattan.
Here is the code for version 1.2.3, written in Processing. The idea for this game was suggested by Clay Shirky.
Pixelsumo wrote about Sketch & Share today.
“Pixelsumo is a site devoted to sonic art, audiovisual fusion, physical interaction, open source technologies, hacking video game culture, responsive environments & installations.“
Here’s a copy of all of our BlueWay final presentation materials from Interaction Design class:
- Experience Brief Presentation including three different map options
- Kiosk in Flash
- Processing code in progress for BlueWay display
Both the kiosk and the display will undergo significant changes before the show. Kiosk steps will be reduced to fewer screens, while improving user control of the process. Display behaviors will change to better link to different dimensions of information. Literal and abstract mapping features will be created. There will of course be a general reduction in unmotivated activity so that movement is linked only to significant events. We look forward to receiving a wide variety of useful feedback during the show, and this will be folded into the following iteration of BlueWay.
Above is a system diagram for BlueWay, the Bluetooth presence detection system that we are building for the ITP Spring Show. There will be a total of six sensor modules which pass Bluetooth discovery information generated by a BlueSMiRF radio to an ZigBee mesh networking radio. All the remote ZigBee radios connect to one on a central base station, which passes all of their information via a secure TCP/IP Internet connection to a display system. The display system runs in Java, and connects to a database of the people’s names and pictures that are linked to their Bluetooth ID. These names and pictures are shown on a central display. Looking for someone? Check BlueWay to see where they are!
Here’s the final presentation that we gave to our User-centered Design class. We also presented a live-action demonstration of our ReadTV concept (Little Prince version).
We made a video of the highlights of our user testing. (For privacy reasons, this link is only available within ITP.)
The Sketch & Share prototype is now built, tested and reprogrammed with better light control and fun sounds. We gave a final presentation for Mattel (PDF) | (Keynote) on Monday. The computer version was coded in Processing and the two communicate over the Internet using a Lantronix WiPort (visible in the guts of the toy below). Here is the PIC code that runs the prototype’s microcontroller, and the Sketch & Share code for Processing.
How it looks on the inside:
