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So the second part of my vibrator glove (which I am told sounds somewhat scandalous) is a separate controller glove. It is wired with flex sensors (as opposed to vibration motors) and so when you bend one finger on the brown gloves, it turns on the vibrator motor of the matching finger in the teal glove.
Ideally, two people far away from each other in distance, could communicate physical awareness through the flex sensor and receive that awareness through the vibration glove (so each person would have one of each). I've also got other ideas for it, though. Or larger ideas. I have a handful of trashed guitars that I'd like to "play" for people with the gloves. Because the flex sensor glove is on the left hand, I could, theoretically anyway, press chords on the fretboard and then have that transfer directly to the strumming of the strings via the vibration motors. That isn't one to one (bar chords for example) so I was thinking it might be fun to make or procure a simpler stringed instrument where one person dictates the strings to be "strummed" and the other person is a passive strummer.
I also hooked up the vibration motor glove to a couple of quick Processing sketches that assigned different combinations of vibration to different letters such that typing words into the program vibrated different patterns on the glove. I did the same thing with music but the patterns are determined by a FFT of the sound waves (something that comes with the Sonia library, my math fu is like a bird that can multiply, it's all instinctual).
So! Putting that together was pretty easy. I'm going to probably post photos of the circuits themselves (since I am likely to forget how to hook them up) and the Processing code (which is super janky) for getting the gloves to talk to each other. I didn't do it in the Arduino IDE because it doesn't run on my computer. I am a fearless (shameless?) installer of software so I'm assuming there's some conflict somewhere but I haven't isolated the issue yet.
Relatedly (that's not a word!) I ordered some light sensors, another nano and some other random stuff from Sparkfun last week and I signed up for the Design, Music and Technology class as my elective next semester. Perhaps we'll see a resurrection of Pinky Le Fur, the furry pressure sensitive keyboard sampler/visualizer or something.Monday, October 26, 2009 // 0 Comments
Somewhere in the last couple of days I realized that soldering is more than just making tiny little terrifying Terminators and that motors and sensors and stuff are, like, easy to put together. (I say this now because I haven't shocked myself or fried any circuits yet but I reserve the right to future correction.)
Last semester, we were introduced to Arduino (a basic microcontroller) but I hadn't done anything beyond the tutorials until this week. I think that's in part because I've been wrestling with other technological demons (hi, Processing!) and also because I required some level of proficiency with those demons (uh, Processing) before I felt confident enough to try something else.
But... it's really easy! My fingers hurt and soldering is endlessly boring and unergonomic but making a little glove with vibration motors at the fingertips was surprisingly simple (to my non-engineering brain). It is, admittedly, terribly janky. I have probably wired things in an awful way and I'm sure there's something bad about using cheap poly-cotton blend gloves from Walgreens (I'll let you know when I shock myself or burn the tips of my fingers). For now, though, fun!
This is one glove. Thanks to the brains of my classmates and lots of fiddling, the motors are controlled individually and I have a basic program that causes a finger to vibrate based on mouse position. That is a totally breeze to change to something else, though and that will happen once the second glove is done and I figure out exactly what these things will be demonstrating.Friday, October 23, 2009 // 0 Comments
Through the grace of my adviser, Wendy Ju along with the hard work of my awesome classmates (Matthew Canton, Gustavo Fricke, Jason Mickelson and Kristin Neidlinger), I got to go to UIST ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Victoria, B.C. over the weekend. I left early to avoid missing class but ended up getting sick and so missed class anyway.
 Closeups of our model
I ended up being the only art school student presenting a project with Microsoft's pressure sensitive keyboard. That was interesting to say the least. Sometimes people didn't quite understand what we were trying to do but everyone was super friendly and some folks were an absolute joy to talk to. Here is the pitch in its more or less final incarnation.
 This is what the setup looked like although I moved the poster and after a while closed the laptop so people would focus more on the model.
"This is Fovea Digitalis, a tool to help laptop musicians maintain connection with their audience. Typically during a live laptop show, you'll see the performer standing, hunched over a laptop, sometimes looking and up and seeing the crowd but then having to go back down into the software. They can't even maintain basic eye contact with their audience because they have to break that connection every few seconds or so to keep track of what's going on with the music. What we've done is essentially turn the keyboard into an instrument, allowing the laptop musician to step away from the laptop and remain integrated into the performance. You can wear it with a strap or integrate it into a suit and the keyboard becomes part of the performance. Samples are triggered under this pink square and then the samples are modulated just by rubbing the keyboard. The music is also tied to the visuals so the audience not only sees what the performer is doing directly but is also surrounded by it as well."
At that point I'd usually show the model we created as context. As the night went on, I also added bits about what the keyboard could be in the future. Samples were limited to just the num pad by our time and my meager programming skills but samples might be mapped to the entire keyboard such that a light tap turns on the sample, a harder tap increases the amplitude and the hardest tap might run it through a filter or keep it on a loop. The precision required to both program and play the keyboard matches it much more closely to a traditional musical instrument which would allow the musician to play for the audience without breaking the persona of performance.
 Closeup of the keyboard skin.
All in all, I think it was a good experience and the conference was fun. Also, meeting people behind a lot of the research I'm collecting for my thesis was invaluable. Now I just have to connect names with faces and send out emails saying "hey, remember me? I was standing around the 3d club model, holding a furry keyboard like a keytar?"Wednesday, October 7, 2009 // 0 Comments
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