Prototyping Interaction
This is a 5 weeks course at Umea Institute of Design, the course deals with applying suitable and relevant technologies for prototyping interaction. Each week we had different workshops, which are arranged from Non-Tech to Hi-Tech as below:
1. Stop Motion
The 1st week we started with this non-digital medium -- Stop Motion, produced few short movies. Check out this project for the details.
2. Phidgets and Literature
The 2nd week we were introduced to the Phidgets and Arduino toolkits. We also reviewed and discussed the topic of prototyping to developed our own understanding and discourse around the topic.
I made these two sketches for this week.
This first one is using a light sensor to control the led, the idea is while the room becomes dark, the led will light up.
The second one is using a RFID sensor to recognize a book. I put a RFID underneath the cover of the book, and I wrote the code both in Arduino and Processing that tell processing to display the image of the book when it receive the RFID number of the book from Arduino.
3. Mobile Interaction
Iphone is a really powerful tool, not because of his father Apple, but the technology behind it. Iphone is a perfect prototyping device contains camera, touch screen, speaker, microphone, accelerometer sensor, proximity sensor...
Check out what I did in this project.
4. Mulitouch, Xbee, DMX
The 4th week becomes more advanced and intensive. We explored Multitouch with Ru Zarin before Thursday, after that, we had Xbee-Arduino and DMX with Camille Moussette.
This is a multitouch football game I made with George, by using ActionScript 3. The way to play is touching the shoes and draging them to kick the ball, left feet stop the ball and right feet kick the ball.
Xbee can make the arduino becomes wirless, which is useful for presenting the prototypes. I made my first wireless sketch to transmit variable data to the base station in the workshop. Watch more in my video report.
DMX is controlling lights from consoles/mixers using a standard digital interface.
5. Processing and Arduino
The last week was amazing Processing workshop with Karsten Schmidt (PostSpectacular) . We went through the basic knowledge of programming such as OOP, array, if statement, for loop.... We also made a media player to play sound and image. On Wednesday and Thursday we played phidgets, we tried using QRcode to control our media player, and using RFID to trigger sending message to Twitter.
Made my first PCV board as an arduino shield, it is a EMF meter.
