Thoughts About New Interactions
Project Documentation and Collection of Things
Unfortunately one cannot attach more than one Leap Motion to one computer, although the feature is highly requested by a lot of developers. Attaching them to Raspberry Pis or to tablets will not work either. I will have to try to get hold of additional computers to install the wanted setting with three leaps.
Video Documentation: User Tests from Jones Merc on Vimeo.
User tests showed that users direct their gestures mostly towards the object, they want to control. A direct dialogue between the user and the object is obvious.
It also showed some interesting insights about how they interact with the gesture lamp. All of them found one of the On/Off gestures pretty quickly, but were puzzled if they came across the other which rather confused them instead of helping them.
Another interesting thing said, was that if a user is controlling sound, the source is less evident than a light (lamp) or a wind (fan) source. Sound/Music is rather surrounding us and therefore a gesture may not be directed that clearly to the object (music-player) itself.
The tests sure make me rethink some interaction steps and help to develop a smoother interaction flow.
Unfortunately testing a Leap Motion upside down hanging from a lamp pointing downwards does not show the same accuracy as if placed in upright position. I therefore need to rethink exhibition layout.
How would you interact with three objects if you had to control them via gestures?
This and other questions are asked in the current user testing phase, where I want to see how people interact with multiple objects (so far they mostly direct their gestures into the object’s direction).
Video Documentation: Gesture Lamp Prototype 1 from Jones Merc on Vimeo.
By connecting a relay with the internet (shiftr.io, Arduino Yun) I am able to control a lamp via gestures using a Leap Motion to detect movements. This prototype can now serve for further user testing to see how people will interact and if they discover the control-gestures by themselves.
To build a lamp prototype which is controllable via gestures I built a relay attached to a normal extension cable. It can connect to the internet and by using Shiftr.io I can send commands from different sources.
Next step will be to use my Leap Motion to send those commands.
Always nice to see that mathematics were not in. Just updated my knowledge about the dot product to calculate angles between two vectors.