http://jannesdegree.wordpress.com/

I’ve joined Microsoft for a 3 month internship in September 2008. It’s been a really great experience so far, I am involved in the real work  of the team. And I also take a lot of responsibilties already. It has been challenging to keep up with this fast-paced team, in a good way. It is  also very interesting to see the differences in the work of a consultancy (Smart Design) to a corporation (Microsoft). And I think I’ll have a better understanding what kind of work I’d like to do in my later life.

I am currently doing an internship at Smart Design. Most projects I am working on are secret at this phase, so I can’t show anything yet (this is why I haven’t posted any new projects in a while). But I can tell that it is really interesting to work with clients, it is a very different way to work as I was used to at school. I am happy to have some prototyping stuff going on and looking forward to the next months at Smart.

And I am looking for a company to sponsor my graduation project at Umea Institute of Design in February 2009. Also I am looking for a job as interaction designer after my graduation in July 2009. Please contact me at jannesp@gmail.com

After the some researches I focused my work on a live music sharing system. You could say, its a Jukebox 2.0.

People in the pub have connected their mobile music players to the system. There is a visualization on the floor showing the musical connections between the different people in the room. A big rotating circle shows the name of the song, that you are listening to together. You can suggested songs to the system by selecting songs from your music library on your mobile music player.
When the user moves, the cirlces around him/her will follow. Each user has circles surrounding, presenting the bands that he/she has in common with other users in the room. Connection lines are drawn between the same bands from different users.

This is a Flash prototype of a visualization that is projected to the floor. (launch or right-click and download)	A Flash Prototype of the user interface for a mobile touchscreen device. launch or right-click and download (its Flash Lite, so you can download it to your mobile device)

A video of the mobile user interface ran on a normal Pocket PC .	Report with more information about this project. download PDF

vitamin B is an exploration of digital and tangible reading. the user can move objects on an interactive table. projected grafics will follow these objects. by manipulating the objects the user can browse pages or books.

done with Arduino, Reactivision and vvvv.

download documentation (pdf 1.3mb)

I worked with Youle and Mike in this project and they had a lot of great and funny ideas. We ended up with three prototypes:

Prototype 1: Work out with Colleagues!

After a certain time of sitting, working and starring at the your computer screen, the picture on the screen seems to shrink. You have to take both handles and pull as hard as you can, to drag the picture on the screen back in its normal position. But its not possible to do it on your own, so you have to ask a workmate or friend to help you. Our intention was to make the people in front of their computer get up from their chairs. Get your mind away from your work for a moment. Have some small workout and meet other people and talk for a while. Their is also a small fan and a blender connected to the computer, providing you with fresh air and a cool drink after the workout.

Prototype 2: Drink sufficient Water!

Our second prototoype focused on the drinking habits of people working at a computer. Sometimes you forget to drink water while working, but drinking is very important for your brain to concentrate and to be creative. So we build a system that senses how much water you drink during your work. There is a small widget on your screen, indicating the water level in your glass. When you forget to drink water for a while, the screen begins to darken… as if it runs out of power (like you are because you didnt drink enough water). After you drunk water, the screens brightens up again.
We used a pressure sensor and some actionscript coding to calculate how much water was drunken. And it worked surprisingly well.

Prototype 3: Share your Files!

 no description yet

i used videotracking in this simpel prototype. a freeframe module that is built into vvvv can track the id-number, position and orientation of fiducial printouts (fiducials were used in the reactable before). i never used videotracking before, but it took me only one day to make this prototype.

rahul and me are working on extended version of this concept at the moment.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

see how we did:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

… i am the guy under the table.

i used the same kind of sensor in my dataglove. but i was always looking at all the people on the internet who used bluetooth to connect wiimotes to their pc.

in the new interaction lab we have some nintendo wiimotes. i connected two of them to my computer and made a 3D model viewing tool.
i build my own nintendo sensor bar to use the wiimotes as a pointing device. so you can drag and drop the 3D model at the desired position. i used the accelerometer to roll and pitch the 3D modell with wiimote one. with the second wiimote i used the accelerometers to zoom in and out.

this video is a bit odd… but at least i explain my creation face-to-face.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

i made this flash during a flash action script course. it took my some thinking about math to get the arrow in the middle to behave as i wanted it to. i also tried to organise the flash file and action script in a way that makes adding more cities very easy or make it even possible to let the user add his/her own cities. unfortunatly i didnt have enough time to complete this project.

please try to fly to stockholm, oslo, kopenhagen, bremen, hamburg… and of course to my current home: umeå.