Tag Archive for interaction

Engage

January 11, 2012 Thoughts No comments

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Yesterday I jotted down a few thoughts about the apparent and impending future of YouTube. One thing I neglected to mention specifically was the one thing I was actually writing about in the first place – brand engagement.

It’s the special sauce that makes things like YouTube run. Forget your utopian dreams of sharing videos or things between friends, this place is where people engage with the brands they love. Or something.

It seems to be everywhere, lurking just beneath the surface. Awareness, market saturation, x is better than y, we seem so happy to play along. It’s appalling. Take a moment to read Maciej’s post about the uncanny valley and do what you can to avoid stumbling through the godawful plethora of online ‘experience‘ available.

I hope that we don’t look back on this time as the moment when we realized we’d been duped into playing someone else’s pointless game.  I really do.

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Non 'design' disciplines

December 1, 2011 Thoughts No comments

I was digging through a few old drafts and this one emerged from 2009, having never before seen the light of day:

Lately I’ve been thinking more on the different pieces of knowledge required to pull together an interactive project / visualisation / installation / design, especially one which needs to be in some way demonstrable in front of a live audience. Yesterday I was speaking with Stephen Viller at the OzCHI conference, about the difference between IT/ICT and Design education methodology. It seems that (any maybe this shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise as it was) that those in the computer sciences or IT streams of education don’t have much call to give verbal account or critique of their work.

As a designer/practitioner/academic/venn diagram inhabitant, I’m painfully aware of the constant requirement of the profession to be able to present, demo and explain your work – even moreso to potentially negative or critical audiences. This verbal technique is just one big part of the profession, you really can’t escape it.  It became clear to me during the week, that many of those in the disparate fields claiming some form of involvement in the HCI community, perhaps do not come from a design paradigm background – and as such do not verbally or even visually present their work to audiences. Textual accounts were common, as were scientific breakdown and analyses, however it really came as a surprise to me that the participants of a conference in “interaction design” (call it what you will) were not very adept at communication in either the verbal or visual form.

There were some notable exceptions, of course – Bill Moggridge’s keynote was engaging if a little dated, and Patrick Hofmann’s User Experience keynote was definitely a highlight.  One other note that I’d like to add is that I very recently forced myself to sit through the length of the Ben Stiller/Vince Vaughan ‘comedy’ Dodgeball. I would highly recommend you avoid this movie at all costs, however one of the funnier moments involves the absurdist acronym ADAA, or the American Dodgeball Association of America – which I must say prepared me very well for the assault of acronyms during the OzCHI week! HISER, HFESA, CHI, CHISIG and many more..

I thought it was worth sharing — my old criticism of the non-design discipline education was just yesterday reinforced by another ICT related encounter which I might see fit to write about in another two years time.

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particle interaction

August 22, 2010 Thoughts No comments

Here we’ll see some chaotic interaction happening between our particles – we can tweak the interaction parameters (e.g. interact(particles_,1,false,-1,40) is where all the magic happens) to allow for different attraction and repulsion forces between each of the particles and their environment.Source Code

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pachube coffee and gps

April 14, 2010 Thoughts 5 comments

Below is a small experiment I’m currently running; very informally I’m updating a pachube feed (‘cups of coffee today’) with the current location data. It’s a bit of an odd experiment – I’m not really always drinking coffee, but once I set it up (using the pachube iphone app, which is pretty simple to use) I discovered that it logged the location of each coffee cup consumed. Not so exciting I know, but I’m interested in the notion that my daily activities and movements can be logged, tracked in some sense and collected to form an image – be that automatically or manually logged data. It’s by no means new territory, but I’m keen to see how it all works out. There’s a chance that the ‘update feed by twitter’ tool will come in handy, but who knows at this point.So as I said, It’s a bit of a mish-mash, however there are a few things of interest. 1. I can log 0 cups of coffee, which will update the location but keep my caffeine intake low. 2. When i do have a cup of coffee the daily tally will increase and I’ll be able to see where and when it all happens (at work, that’s a no brainer..). 3. Along comes this openstreetmap based project from the pachube apps page – Trails.Have a look for yourself, just how well or unwell my coffee consumption is going over the last 24 hours.. Hopefully, if you’re reading this you’ll see a map below, with a gps overlay of location (x,y) and consumption (z) data. If not, then perhaps I’ve not updated in a while. Nonetheless, it’s got me thinking about these new consumer (no pun intended) tools which are now readily available – and free.Not sure where this will go, not exactly sure where it belongs, but it’s worth mentioning at least.Drink up!

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fluid updated

August 12, 2009 Projects 3 comments

I’ve spent a bit more time cleaning up the fluid blobs examples I made last week, this time limiting the Region of Interest and fiddling with the fluid interaction.  Also newly included is a smarter way to interact with the blobs (in the code, i mean), pulling out more precise locational data.  I’ll be looking to mine this one a bit more extensively than I did with the filtration fields installation – and since I seem to be getting better now at things I was attempting before – this should be a lot more fun.In the mix still is some video over network action, as well as potentially a database record of the motion over time.  I’d like to develop this as an interactive (from the visualisation point of view) interface where you could select a day, week or month and view the fluid ripples as they occur, like a fluid time-lapse of the actual motion from the courtyard.  We’ll see.

Fluid Blobs v2 from Jason McDermott on Vimeo.

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Janus

August 6, 2009 Projects One comment

As part of the Smart Light Sydney Festival, May 2009, Tom Barker (Professor of Design, Architecture and Innovation at UTS) and Hank Haeusler (Post-Doctoral Researcher at UTS) were commissioned to design and produce an interactive light sculpture to be exhibited on the light walk in the Rocks.  The piece conceived by Tom was called Janus and was pitched to the SLSF body as;

a giant floating human face in The Rocks..inspired by Janus, the Roman god with two faces, Barker and Haeusler’s installation is part of their ongoing research into complex and non-standard media facades.  Janus uses social media and new technologies to engage the public and influence its art. Photovoltaic cells are used to power the installation.

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The concept for the project was for the face sculpture to act as a mirror to the emotions of the city, as measured using the social media of mms, email and blog updates.  Toms’ earlier research had lead him to explore notions of the nature of facial expressions, our abilities to read and emote via the expressive capabilities of our faces.  With this in mind, it was an interesting experiment – is it possible to measure, collect and respond to accumulated faces – can you determine how happy a city is by watching its’ inhabitants facial expressions?I was invited to join the project as the software design component of the project, as Tom had seen some snippets of my interaction design work, as well as the work of my students in the computational environments class.  Naturally my first thought was to ask Frank Maguire if he was interested in joining me on the project – having worked with Frank on the Filtration Fields installation, his industrial design skills and generally snappy logical mind made him the perfect partner in crime..

The main crux of the project production from our end was in coding the algorithms which would translate images of faces into emotional readings (happy, sad, surprised, angry, fearful, disgusted and neutral), using these readings to trigger pre-recorded videos and controlling the video output to a non-rectilinear array of 192 pixels.Having worked frequently with camera images, facial emotions I was confident in that component of the programming, as with the data munging and video triggers.  However, having never used more than 4 LEDs to output recorded/live video, I couldn’t be so sure I could guarantee the display robustness – but with such a challenge, how could I say no to the project!After a few initial tests using a standard Arduino board in a non-stanard manner, I had managed to get ~20 LEDs lighting up with varying PWM values and we were off and running.  It turned out that the technique I had tested was naughtily using the arduinos’ onboard resources and was not a sustainable way of outputting video – so we had to look elsewhere.Options included using a daisy-chain of chips to multiply the output of an arduino duemillanove board, an arduino Mega and the phidgetLED 64.

With project timelines fairly short, we opted for the output mode we felt would be simplest/most trusted/idiot proof, which our experience told us would be the phidgetLED 64.  The phidget range of interface kits are bread and butter for the interactivation studio, as well as my computational environments students, as well as being able to claim a dedicated output of 64 PWM leds per board – which meant that we could order 3 and end up with spare LED output pins.The face itself could then be split up into separate sections to be addressed individually by each Phidget board – the forehead, center and chin regions containing around ~60 pixels each.  This allowed us to divide up the phidget output coding into regions and simplify a bit of our output matrixing.  I’d spent some time earlier working with maxduino to get greyscale LED output from pixelated video (a matrix of 6 x 1 pixels!), and luckily I was able to put that patch to work with a little bit of scaling, upgrading to the required resolution.The first issue we came to was the phidget method of sending single line matrices to the phidgetLED64 from top-left pixel to bottom-right pixel.  Since we were not working with a rectangular screen, each row of pixel data had to be offset from the starting 0 point, yet still line up with the neighbouring rows.

See Also;http://vividsydney.com/ http://www.smartlightsydney.com/artists/barker-and-haeusler http://www.timeoutsydney.com.au/aroundtown/smart-light-sydney–vivid-sydney.aspx

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