Thoughts About New Interactions
Project Documentation and Collection of Things
To get a dimmable lamp I will switch to LED instead of common light bulbs. Three high power LEDs should emit enough light to imitate a normal light bulb. I will place the LEDs in the same lamp shade as the one I was using in the first prototype with the relay. Now that I don’t need the relay with the lamp anymore, I will reuse the relay with the ventilator.
And at some point he (the programmed assistant) asks questions like «Did you know that other gestures exist?» That’s where I would like to answer, but no answer is expected by the machine. … That’s also confusing.
During the first complete user test with the music player a lot of interesting feedback came together. Beginning with things, which seem quite easy to resolve like the point above — the solution would be not to ask any questions, if the user can’t answer via gesture — going over to other simple statements («The music was too loud») and ending with more complex things like the question if and how much visual feedback is required to generate a pleasant user experience.
At the moment visual feedback is non-existent but substituted by acoustic feedback. Sounds for swiping, changing the volume and switching it on and off are provided. Still they are much more abstract, because the user first has to link a sound to a gesture or to an action respectively. Paired with faulty behaviour of the leap motion tracking device this leads to a lot of frustration. Some of it maybe can be replaced by redesign the assistant and it’s hints. (Maybe even warnings that the tracking is not 100% accurate).
Further user testing will give more insight if and how much the assistant should intervene.
Also, a deeper analysis of the video recordings taken from the test, will help improving the user experience.
Further notations:
To get a roundish — almost cute — shape, I lasercut slices to achieve a very organic form. I intend to stick them together and sand the edges down until I obtain a smooth surface. The shape will then stand on for small posts. The look will be similar to the one of the small foam model.
After realising that I was facing performance problems in the browser, I checked chrome’s timeline to see where bottlenecks occured. Biggest factor was caused by «painting» the new characters on the browsers canvas, just like you can see it here in this early prototype.
I am not sure yet how to solve this problem, but for now I disabled the typewriter function.
Another bottleneck could be the scripting including all the calculations made in the gesture checker javascript file. Maybe I will have to throttle some tasks to improve performance again.
This schematic shows a setup to control (dim) an LED via Arduino. An external power supply is controlled with a transistor, which is dependent on the input of the arduino. Pulse width modulation (PWM) allows to downregulate the voltage of the power supply to the voltage required by the LED.
I need this to dim the lamp via gestures. I will therefore map a certain value (e.g. Y-axis value) to the brightness of the LED.
The shape for the radio object should be like the one in the model. Or at least similar. Very few controls, to not confuse the user about functionality (few controls = few gestures). I’d like the shape to be roundish, a little like the colored iMacs. The object should not feel too technical, because there is already a big step between the current radios and gestured controlled radios – which is based on technical changes. By making the object rounder I intend to increase the feel of talking to something «smart», something alive.
After playing around with the recordings and a lot of try outs in garageband (music instruments) and searching a sound database I came up with the sounds above.