Back to the Flower!

After much brainstorming and discussion, my team of five decided that for the final project, we were actually going to keep going with the flower from sketch 2; the flower that sits on the shoulder of a garment, that opens in response to intimate touch given to the wearer.

However, we are gong to expand the idea.
Here is a sketch my teammate completed:

Our project will now have a fabric flower that sits on the shoulder, but from the flower will grow a network of illuminated vines to represent spores. The lights spread gently down the garment and wraps the user with a dimly lit glow. With displays of intimacy towards the wearer (stroke on the back, hug, pat on the shoulder), the LEDs will light up. Brightness of the LEDs vary, just as openness of the flower varies according to the level of intimacy experienced.

So does the flower stay open and LEDs stay lit?

The answer is no. We that the open state of the flower and bright state of the LEDs depends on the level of intimacy as well. Here are the proposed scenarios:

Scenario
Two main participants: the wearer and the supporter (i.e. a close friend who is a “hugger,...,...”)
Onlookers (individuals within the immediate environment)

Scenario 1: Pat (least intimate)
In this scenario, the wearer’s friend gently pats the wearer on the shoulder as a friendly greeting, or a gesture of comfort. The flower opens up to its minimal state (maybe ⅓ of the whole way)
Flower open/lights on duration: 5 minutes

Scenario 2: Hug
This hug is a casual hug. It could be a greeting or a brief show of friendship and gratitude.
Flower open/lights on duration: 10 minutes

Scenario 3: Stroke
The third state would be a stroke, possibly when a friend comforts the wearer when the wearer is sad. Flower open/lights on duration: 15 minutes

Scenario 4: Bear Hug (most intimate)
In this case, the friend is intimate enough to give a full-body hug. The flower would open to its widest and the lights would brighten up to the fullest.
Flower open/lights on duration: 20 minutes

So as of now we are happy with the idea. However, there are still some problems to be looked into and questions to be asked. For example:

1. Would this shirt be worn in everyday life, or only to be used for display in a gallery setting?

2. Can the flower and LED effectively communicate the sense that the wearer feels loved?

3. How are we going to program to ensure sensors accurately detect varying strengths of touch?

4. Last time, we sewed pouches for the sensors and it created a awkward bumps on the back of the wearer. Is there a way to avoid the bumps this time?

Final Project begins!

This time I am in a team of five people.

The theme of our project is still embodiment, and we are brainstorming three ideas:

1. Hoodie circled with LEDs so the user may read in a dark place.

2. Sword-fighting game in which there are three sensors on each combatant's body, one on each sword, and one on the combatants' free hands. Should the sword touch the sensors on the body, the player who got "stabbed" would lose HP. However, should the player catch the sword with a free hand, then HP goes back up by 1. The speed and force with which the sword is thrust affects how much HP is lost.

3. A display installation/performance art piece where a dancer/performer wears gloves with accelerometers attached, and depending on the movement of accelerometers, a large suspended fabric would react in different ways. Wires would pull up/drop corners, or the middle of the fabric.

So far the team, myself included like our third idea the best, because it encompasses embodiment. The dancer's movements can affect the aesthetics of the art piece. Right now problems include, how to build the structure that holds the fabric. We'll see how this project goes!

Sketch 2 Full Explanation

I suppose I've been busy and had not fully explained what the garment with the flower was all about.

The Main Idea
When a user wears the garment and an intimate friend/family member touches the sensor on the garment, a flower on the shoulder would open and close.

We have divided the varying touches into four categories from least intimate to most intimate:

1. Pat on the shoulder, as in a greeting

2. Friendly Hug, as in greeting or show of friendship

3. Stroke on the back, as in comforting gesture

4. Firm Hug, intimate friends

If a user is patted on the shoulder by a friend, the flower opens slowly.

If a user is hugged tightly by an intimate friend, the flower opens quickly.

Concept Behind the Idea

The idea was to promote a sense of friendship and trust. We explored the potential of the sense of touch to provide intimacy in friendship. The flower acts as a metaphor for opening up to people, because we wouldn't let strangers give us a hug, and even if they are friends we are still selective about who can stroke our back or give us a firm hug. The more intimate the gesture is received, the more the wearer opens up to her friend.

Inside the flower we embedded an LED to strengthen the metaphor, so the closed bud protects the LED, and the opening of the flower reveals the LED (which represents personal connection).

Embodiment

This garment is meant to be worn as casual everyday wear, so we had to think about which places to sew the sensors to make the actions natural, because it would not make sense to make the audience go out of their way to purposely touch the sensors. 

While testing our garment, we had to act out the scenarios of a greeting, comforting, and take photos of where our hands were placed, so we could sew the sensors where the hands would naturally touch them.

Mechanical Flower

The flower was very difficult to make. We originally wanted to make the flower petals attached to a right of spandex. Fishing wire would go through the spandex, and when the servomotor turns, the wires would be pulled, and the flower would close. However, the spandex could not be tight enough to close all the petals.

So our final idea was to attach each petal to a string, and have the servomotor pull the strings downwards from the middle, causing the petals to rise up and enclose the middle.

Coding

Unfortunately, our project could not work out for the presentation because we did not figure out the servomotor code. However, the mechanics of the flower were fine, and the varying touches of the sensors were successfully sensed.

Feedback we received was to make the flower's motion more fluid and natural to improve the aesthetics.

For our third project, my team and I plan to explore new ideas, but after the semester we plan to finish this project.

Sketch 2 More Progress

We sewed pouches to put the sensors in, and sewed  in the wires.

We have also finished sewing the flower.

This is what I look like right now.

Sketch 2 Progress

As of now we have sketches of the project. One challenge is brainstorming what the flower will look like, and how we will control the opening and closing.

We have also created a prototype flower, just to test the opening and closing. In the lecture we discussed that actions of the mechanics have to be fluid and natural. This is called aesthetics, for example, a balloon would have to look and behave like a balloon. As this is only a one-week project we don't know if we can achieve that amount of fluidity, but we will do our best!

Sketch 2 Changed Idea

So now instead of a creature we are making a flower. We plan to have the flower open up to intimacy of the wearers (eg. when friends pat each other on the shoulder, or give each other a hug). This project would be embodied as the whole body could be involved in these actions.


In class we also talked about actions in the physical world being implemented in interactive devices. We thought this project would fit the concept because these gestures between friends are natural in the physical world.


As for the flower, a closed bud represents a humans being closed up, and as the flower opens, it brings the metaphor of humans opening up themselves to someone they trust (friends).

The Start of Sketch 2

We are starting our sketch two project in a team of three. In this project we're still using wearable soft circuits. Before we started brainstorming ideas we thought about how to give users an embodied experience, as we talked about in class.

The three categories of Actuation are:

1. Quality - different flow of the circuit, range, strength
2. Scale - how big or small
3. Material - what fabric/other material to use

We also thought about how to provide users with an embodied experience, so we wanted to make a fabric "creature" that sits on the shoulder of a garment that lights up to physical contact between people.

Gloves, LEDs and Clenched Fists

In our class, the professor and TA talked about interaction as in gesture evoking a response. One question the professor asked was, as the user is using the object:

What state of mind are they in?

Keeping the question in mind, my partner and I got inspired:
Sometimes people subconsciously (they don't always know it) clench their fists when they're nervous or angry. We thought we could make a glove to help them be more aware of this behavior. The LED on the glove would light up (on and off, as it is a digital signal) about once per second. As the wearer clenches the fist, a switch would be triggered and the LED would light up about twice per second.
The gesture would be the fist clenching, and the response is the LED lighting up faster to signal the wearer that their fist is clenched.

Here is a picture of a glove.

As you can see, there is an LED, a resistor, and wires attached to it.

Here is another picture:

This is our switch! We are using aluminum foil to conduct, and the sponge holds them apart, but when the user clenches a fist, the aluminum pieces will touch and speed up the lighting pulse of the LED.

We made an exterior pocket on our glove to contain the switches.


The pocket was made out of pink cleaning cloth. We thought the color matched rather well.

Here is how we attached everything; conductive thread. It was used to sew the LED and the wires onto the gloves. The picture above shows the pins of the LED, which we had to curl up so we can loop the thread through.

Here is the final product:

As shown in the photo, the pins of the wires were attached to an Arduino Diecimila board, and was connected to the computer, where we ran the code.

That's it for now, looking forward to our Sketch 2 project!

Soft Circuit In-Class Exercise

After we learned MaxMsp we moved on to learn Arduino. The first thing we did in lab was to try to create a circuit using conductive material. Here is a photo:

My partner and I used aluminum foil as a conductor to light up a red LED. We connected the pins of the wires to an Arduino Diecimila board.

After that we played with the Arduino program on my laptop, as well as a breadboard to make a more complex circuit.