#wearable interface

“Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) have come up with a flexible artificial skin which can provide haptic feedback and could be used for everything from VR to medical rehabilitation. The skin is made of silicone and electrodes, and it can conform to shapes such as wrapping around a fingertip or wrist to provide feedback in the form of pressure or vibration. The skin has sensors embedded within it that can detect deformations so that the feedback can be adjusted in response to movements, making it more useable and giving more realistic feedback.”

Inrak Choi, Heather Culbertson, Mark R. Miller, Alex Olwal and Sean Follmer. “Grabity: A Wearable Haptic Interface for Simulating Weight and Grasping in Virtual Reality”,  Stanford University Department of Mechanical Engineering.

“Grabity is a novel, unified design based on the combination of vibrotactile feedback, uni-directional brakes, and asymmetric skin stretch. The gripper-style haptic device can simulate grasping motions with a real object (top), in Virtual Reality (bottom). Gravity provides vibrotactile feedback during contact, high stiffness force feedback during grasping, and weight force feedback during lifting.”

MIT's Next Breakthrough Interface? Temporary Tattoos

Inspired by popular gold leaf temporary tattoos, MIT Media Lab and Microsoft Research teamed up on a crafty new wearable interface.

So after several days of dealing with horrible programs such as animata and all the small stuff that comes with it, we have received our big project 3:

The Wearable Interface.

First thought about it was wow ok come again? Clearly a joke especially since I found out that it was an individual project this time. This came with excitement and evidently, fear. I am pretty keen on working on something that is what I want to do. My ideas, my way and my work. I want to see how well I can do in this course with my individual work. However! What i didn't like about the project was the fact that they expected us to think up of our idea and start working on it over the holiday! Ok, study break but still who honestly works over the study break??? I personally think that they should've given us the work a week before so that we were able to start on and, talk it over with the lecturers about our idea and then have something to work with over the holiday!

The project itself was confusing to the max (no pun intended). Working with a program that I have had minimal usage of and minimal understanding of was going to be a challenge. Also having to build it without any idea on how I'm going to be able to build it...this is clearly challenge after challenge.

This project went totally different than I first thought... Initially I was very gobsmacked when we were first given the assignment because of a few reasons. First of all the project was our first individual project which meant that everything was up to me. Also I thought that I was going to struggle with the programming side because I only started to learn programming when I started this course. I also thought that the project was going to be hard because most of it was in our holiday break which meant that my tutors were not around for help.

The hardest thing for me in this project was coming up with a concept idea. It took me a few days to come up with the idea of turning the standoff scene from my movie into a game. Initially I was going to make some kind of gun interface but then I found out that guns were not an option for the project. Coming up with an idea in this project was a lot harder than in previous projects seems it was all individual work. I organized some holiday study sessions so that a few of us could work together and develop ideas together which made it easier to construct our concepts. In the end I came up with the standoff game idea and the use of the movement of the head to control it. Using the movement of the head tied in really well with the standoff game and the western genre of my film because there is not a lot of body movement in a standoff, the only movement is the movement of the head. Researching the idea of using movement to control a video or a computer program wasn't too hard because there seemed to be a lot of information on the internet. Seems I was using a keyboard hack for the chip in my interface, I had to find a switch that would turn on or off when moved in a certain way. I decided to use mercury tilt switches to sense the movement of the head so I went out and bought one and did a few tests and discovered that they worked exactly how I wanted.

Constructing my interface was not as hard as I thought it was going to be. I used a cowboy hat to mount the keyboard hack in and the switches on. I mounted one on the front to sense the 'dodging' motion and one on each side to sense the side to side looking movement. I thought that my biggest problem was going to be that more than one of the switches were going to be activated with the motion of the head. I didn't really get this problem at all because I made sure that I mounted the switches on the right angles which prevented more than one switch being activated at the same time. If I were to develop my interface further, I would like to make a full body motion interface and use a wireless keyboard of the hack.

Project finished! I have done all the modifications to my patch and interface so that it works every time it's used.

Well I came into uni today because I thought that I was going to need help for the final adjustments in my patch. I was trying for ages last night to stop the 'flinch' message from coming up after the 'you got shot' message. I tired sending bangs to different toggles and switches but I just couldn't find the right route. Then I can into uni today and I fixed the problem on my first attempt! Sometimes I think it's good to walk away form a problem and come back to it later with a clear mind. I have had to do this so many times in this project because I found I was always coming across programming problem. I also made a full presentation mode for my patch and written up some instructions so the user knows what to do and what to load. Before I went to bed last night, I finished making my hat interface. I put the last switch on the hat and tidied up all the wires so that it looks nice. I used some more hot glue to keep everything in its place and to make it look tidy. I found out what each movement's ASCII values are so that I could put them into my patch. The movements all seem to be working fine because I wast getting more that one switch being switched on at once. I might try and find some foam now so that I can put it into the hat so that it's a little bit more comfortable to wear and it will also hit all the wires and chips.

My patch is now officially working how I want it to work! It feels so great having everything work because I thought that I'd never be able to make my ideas work in MAX MSP. I spent about half an hour today with Kim (one of my tutors), working on my if statements for the 'dodge' switch. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but I wasn't a 100% sure where to put all the values. In the end we got the if statements working but when I went to put them into the rest of my patch, they didn't communicate together. I spent ages trying to work it out and I started to find it hard to concentrate because everyone was asking Ben and I for help with their patchers. In the end I decided to pack up and buy the rest of the switches I needed for my hat, and then go home... I think I needed to give my mind a break and do something else so I could start working on my program later with a clear head.

Well as soon as I got home, I emailed Jared my if statement so he could see if I was doing anything wrong, but he thought it looked fine. I then started to play around with the statement in another patcher, which was great because I then discovered that I was not using it correctly. I then chucked it into my main patcher and it all fitted together perfectly. My program is looking a bit messy at the moment so I thought I would take another break from it and write this blog. All I have to do now on the patcher is tidy everything up and change the ASCII values of the switches so that my hat interface will work with the program.