312 Assignment Two. Summary. 600WORDS

The final product of our group assignment, “Gears”, is a steam punk aesthetically designed physical and virtual interactive system.
It consists of a wooden box with a button on the side and a metal cage on the top that contains mechanised cogs. The cogs are controlled by a crank handle on the side of the cage. As the crank handle is turned, the cogs trip an infrared sensor connected to an Ardunio circuit board. The Ardunio interacts with a flash file on the connected computer.
The visual aspect of the flash file is made up of two parts; the inside of the steam punk transportation and the viewing window.
The inside of the virtual steam punk transportation is largely made up of cogs and gears which turn with the physical cogs when the crank handle is turned, there is also an abstracted steam engine on the left which converts water into steam and powers the virtual cogs.
The virtual viewing window shows a 3D rendered environment that that the transportation system is traveling up through. The transport travels upwards when the crank handle is turned, but this drains the water and pressurizes steam in the engine, this is graphically represented by two bars below the view screen. If the steam and water levels go into red, the engine goes into critical. This causes the engine to start to break apart stopping the user from travelling upward and making the transport starts to descend. This is accompanied by small explosions, steam release and other various malfunctions. To remedy this, the button on the side of the physical model must be pressed to open the steam valve and replenish the water. If the button is pressed the crank will start working again and the user can travel upwards once more.
The parts I mainly worked on were initial research and concept development, the abstracted steam engine, the physical model, the sounds and the presentation. In the abstracted steam engine we originally planned to have the water and steam molecules personified to fit our original proposal “empathic creatures” but we took this out because the aesthetic clashed with the steam punk base of our system and the 3D environment.
Of the physical model I produced and designed everything apart from the cog pieces (which were laser cut by john), part of the lid of the wooden box, the cog mechanics on the outside of the metal cage and the metal cage itself which we got from Plastic Box.
I made the wooden box and lid from pine ply, made the metal joiners for the box, cut the Perspex and rod to size to fit into the metal cage and designed and implemented the cog mechanics and infrared sensor interactivity on the inside of the cage. I stained the wood but I didn’t paint the cogs or metal cage.
I produced the sounds for the system flash system which are activated by the physical system. There is ambient mechanical noise for the background, an engine breakdown noise, noises attached to the engine valves and steam release, and a noise for when the crank handle is being turned, this aurally displays that the cogs are in motion. I also produced the video for the presentation with Shaun.

312 Assignment Two. Sounds.

Created the sounds for the flash environment and fixed up some of the physical model. Also made the video for the final presentation.

312 Assignment Two. Physical Model - Pre Alpha

Got the cogs inside the box working and made a crank handle for the side out of hardened piano wire. Put in the sensor. Everything is ready to go but I'm going to add more cogs.



After the alpha presentation we decided that we need to add more interactivity to our system so a few more edits on the physical model will be needed.

312 Assignment Two. Physical Model.

Started work on the physical model for the group. Because we had basically nothing in this area and it was kind of urgent.

Got a metal cage from plastic box which Kin painted.


Made the lid of the box, sanded and stained it.


Built the physical model out of pine ply, sanded it and stained with ‘wood gel’ so that the wood would fit the steam punk aesthetic.






Put the box together, added metal joiners to hold it all together and cut perspex for the cross bars that would eventually support the cogs.

312 Assignment Two. Characters.

I started work on character creation for the group.
Below are complied versions of some concept sketches and then digital concepts. the characters are personified water drops which turn into steam drops to power the steam punk machine.

312 Assignment Two. Research.

After a few group meetings we decided on where our project was heading. A steam punk style interactive system.
For one of the progress checks I complied my research into the power point slides below.

Start of Assignment Two. Proposals

312 Assignment Two - Katravah
Engineering Human Empathy through Mechanical Gesture.

Proposal ONE
Community of creatures live in an environment on screen which receives nourishment when the physical object is interacted with. The more nourishment that the creatures have available the more the creatures multiply. As they multiply, the nourishment runs out. If all the nourishment runs out the creatures start dying off until there is only one left who changes to a skinny malnourished look. The nourishment on the screen is represented by the colour of the environment. If the environment is black then there is no available food for the creatures. As the user interacts with the object it changes the colour of the background and ‘feeds’ the creatures.




Proposal TWO

Environment based where interactions of users changes how well the environment prospers. The environment is made up of flora floating around on the screen. When the interaction is made between the users and the program, it changes the amount of resources available to the flora. The flora grows and seeds out new flora if there is lots of interaction, if there is little interaction the flora stays the same and if there is no interaction the flora slowly dies out.

Flash work and Finalising

Finished off my flash work, polished up and finalised it. Changed the style up a bit. I used a paper texture through the animation to give it some depth. Put everything together. Main part of the assignment is done now. I've taken screenshots, so I just need to record a video, write a blurb about it and create a .pdf poster

Screenshots:

Physical Object

Made my physical object over a couple days, stained the wood and added my circuit to it. I purchased some small light bulbs and cut them open so that I would just use the glass to hold the light sensor.

Bush Walk

I went for a walk through the bush on the way to Uni to try and find some wood for my physical object. I ended up leaving the track and climbing up a hill covered in gorse. Lost the track, found another about an hour later and finally got out of the bush a couple hours after that. I didn’t find any wood I wanted to use. After this I went to Uni. Ended up finding a block of wood that I wanted to use in a scrap bin. Yay for recycling

Worked on Flash Animation

Got the animation working and nested within the Ardunio code so I got the main part of the AS3 working in my flash file. Tweaked aspects of the style and tweaked the code to make the whole thing more visually appealing.

Given an Extension

Thankfully I was given an extension for this assignment so I’ll have the break to finish it off.

Flash, Lost Saves, Rethinking Interation and Pneumonia

Just been working on animating my flash environment recently. Had some trouble with the spray can in flash but worked it out, just had to use the break apart function.

Just now went to take a screenshot of my WIP but it doesn’t look like any of my work has saved properly since the last flash update. Hopefully I saved it under a different file name and just can’t find it. Maybe it’s on my login at uni? Odd. Frustrating. Annoying. Could of been because my external was screwing up, maybe I accidentally was saving to the backup I made at uni. Which reminds me, I still have that cable you lent me Doug, I'll bring it in tomorrow.

Also been considering the physical interaction that I’m going to use. I can’t think up a good way to use the temperature sensor that will react fast enough to body heat from an orb, liquid in the orb wouldn’t work and the bigger the orb is the longer it will take to warm. Considering that I wanted the orb to be hand held size I don’t think this interaction will work out very well, so I’ve been considering using a light sensor instead – Light relates to heat anyway so I think that would work out well. Just need to consider now how to present that sensor in a designed way. Maybe a clear orb that you can cut off the light to with your hand?

Also went to the Doctor today, I’ve had pneumonia since Saturday. Perfect timing considering all the looming hand-ins!

EEG Computer Interaction

Found this awesome new device on TED, thought I’d post in on here because it has a lot to do with the future of computer interaction. It’s a headset that can read your brainwaves, essentially you can control the computer with your mind instead of having to use a mouse/keyboard/ardunio.
LINK

More Flash

Did some more flash work, started animating my timeline. I now have a pond that changes from frozen to liquid and snow that melts to reveal grass. I found out that you can’t do ‘gotoandplay’ in reverse so once I’ve finished animating in one direction I’ll have to go through and animate the reverse.

Ardunio

In class we went through how to hook up the arduino with flash, I got mine working and then changed it around a bit so that I could control the movement of a character on the screen using light and vibrations using both the light sensor and the flex sensor. I was able to make one sensor effect the X coordinate and the other effect the Y coordinate.

Flash work

I started creating my environment for the assignment; I chose my concept where the flash environments temperature is affected by the temperature sensed by the ardunio. I may still change what type of sensor I’m going to use. I might end up using a light sensor and change the flash environment temperature based on light levels.

Second Tutorial

The second tutorial I chose to do can be found HERE It’s a guide to everything about the pen tool in illustrator. I went through all the parts that I didn’t already know from Photoshop to get a better understanding of the pen tool in illustrator. The guide goes along side an exercise that trains you in using the pen tool in illustrator.

Interactive Light Table Video

Found this project on Vimeo. Relates to the assignment in a way. Bit more advanced but good inspiration.

Augmented Shadow, by Joon Moon, 2010. Used openframeworks. It's a tabletop interface on where artificial shadows of tangible objects displayed. You can play with the shadows lying on the boundary between the real, virtual, and fantasy.

Video is HERE

First Post, First Tutorial

Since I've never really used Adobe Illustrator before I decided a good place to start with tutorials for 312 would be with that.
I chose this tutorial here about tracing photos using illustrator because I've tried doing something similar before using flash.

Screencap of WIP during tutorial: