Taking some pictures of the white painted and reassembled lamp.
Tag: lamp
Yellow Lamp Waits to be Painted White
Instead of buying another lamp, I decided to stick with the yellow one. It’s true that its look may not be as reduced as the radio’s, but after looking for an affordable lamp alternative, I must say, that finding a very good fit, is probably impossible. Designing my own lamp won’t be possible due to time restraints and so I hope that painting the lamp with the exact same white color as the other objects and taking away some smaller parts will make it clear that those three objects belong to the same object-family.
Video Documentation: Dimmable Lamp
Video Documentation: High Power LED dimming via Web from Jones Merc on Vimeo.
Using shiftr.io, an Arduino Yun and any sort of publishing device to shiftr (in this case a webpage publishes commands to increase or decrease LED brightness) allows me to control a lamp. This means I can also use gestures to trigger the publishing of those commands.
Soldering High Power LEDs
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.
Video Documentation: User Tests
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.
First gesture lamp prototype
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.