Author: Ting Yang

A. Life of Tears – Ting Yang – Prof. Andy Garcia

B. CONCEPTION AND DESIGN:

• Conception:

Inspiration: It came from eye drops that I use every day. Every time I use the eye drops, some of them will come out of my eyes, looking like tears.

Background: In traditional Chinese society, crying is not welcomed. crying presents your weakness. Even till now, a lot of my friends around me still take tears as a shame.

Purpose: The project aims to present the realistic process of having tears and show the meaning of tears. Tears are not only the liquid coming out of the eyes but also a container of emotions. Every tear with emotion recorded the valuable life experience that caused one to have mood swings. The article “ The Science of Crying” gave me the insight that crying can have a positive effect – RELIEF. In my project, I hope people can integrate their recent emotions with it. Relieve the negative emotions and share the happy emotions. Crying is a natural, normal, and healthy way to express our emotions. 

Interaction: First, people squeeze the eye drop bottles. The teardrop with corresponding emotion will fall onto the eye and go out of the eye. Each drop will trigger a certain sound and a drop animation with a certain color.

1. 1. ANGER: Horn – Road Rage
   2. TIMIDITY: Heartbeat – Our heartbeat goes faster when we are afraid.
   3. REGRET: Rustling Leaves – Regret what we have done before so we want time to go back.
   4. COMPASSION: Whimpering Dog – Small animals can trigger our compassion easily.
   5. SORROW: Baby Cry – Adults can consciously control their crying sounds but babies cannot, which can arouse more empathy.
   6. HAPPINESS: Cat Meow – Magic of triggering happiness

(These are the first two draft design scripts.)

• User Test:

In the user test, there are only eye drop bottles with sensors, a 3D eye model, and the code of sound triggering. 

– Suggestions I got 

1. 1. Use a stand to hang these bottles
   2. A projector
   3. Eye as the canva (don’t use LED)
   4. More animation
   5. Hide the wires
   6. Change Bottles’ colors
   7. Restart button
   8. A box to hide the wires
   9. more emotions

– Changes I made:

1. 1. I gave up the idea of hollowing the eye model and adding LEDs inside to show the drops. Instead, I planned to use the projector and project the drop animation directly on the eye. 
   2. I added a positive emotion and made it like a restart button. When it is triggered, other sounds of negative emotions will stop. Therefore, I don’t have to upload the code in Arduino every time before playing.

• Mechanism:

After the user test, I made this mechanism script with measurements to do laser cutting.

C. FABRICATION AND PRODUCTION:

• CODE

I struggled a lot with the code. I needed to translate and understand the code first because it was from someone else. Then, I converted the code of random and continuous drops to drops that I could trigger in certain positions with certain sounds and colors. However, I still encountered a lot of problems. For example, the drop was constantly triggered by one squeezing but I wanted each squeezing to trigger the drop once. And then, the drop cannot be triggered more than once. After that, the drop of happiness cannot be triggered. Different problems happened one after another. I fixed some of them and for others, I sought help from Gottfried and Steve. They helped me a lot in the code.

• SHELF

I used cuttle.xyz to make the shelf. And Dalin helped me revise it on the computer in Fablab. The material I chose for the shelf is the white acrylic board. The reason I chose white is that white can be influenced by any color easily and white can help show every color clearly. White material helped make my project look clean.

Dalin found the wrong material: plastics. And it melted🫠

I think it is his “black history” now. haha:)

It was a longggg process of peeling the cover of the acrylic board. I was attacked by the stinky smell of the acrylic board and my fingernails were sacrificed for this shelf. But fortunately, everything fits well. The shelf looked delicate and neat.

However, when I was measuring the hole for the projector. I found out that I needed to make two new interlayer boards because there wasn’t enough room for the projection in the first version of the shelf.

Dalin showed me how to use the acrylic glue and explained the principle of the glue: melting the acrylic material.

This is the final version of the shelf.

• Circuit & Cover

The circuit was quite simple that connected six sensors.

I bought a cloth as the canva of the projector before. After I decided to use the eye model directly as the canva, the cloth was useless. Therefore, I planned to use it as the cover of the circuit. This design also benefited me to check the circuit conveniently. To make good use of this cloth, I covered it on the whole project so that the projector could be covered and the appearance of the project became better. It added the dynamic sense and made it look like a temple of emotions (description from Andy).

• Projector

I spent a lot of time on how to use this projector. With Anya’s help, I finally made it and measured the distance from the projector to the eye model well.

At first, for a good look, I made a box for the projector. However, it was not good for the projector to exhaust heat and the sound of the fan became loud. So I gave up this box.

In the test of the projector on the shelf, I found out the direction of the projecting light wasn’t as vertical as I thought. Therefore, I sought help from Dalin to make this little stand on the projector.

• EYE

I found the eye model and eyeball model on Thingverse.

I 3D printed a small sample of eye model to see the shape in reality. Then I felt it was too simple. So I found the eyeball model and added it to the eye model. The effect was beyond expectation. However, the nice pattern wasn’t that clear in the strong light of the projector, which was one of my pities.

• EYE DROP BOTTLES

I used foam inside the bottle to help squeeze on the pressure sensors. It turned out that the flexibility of the foam was appropriate and nice. The interaction can be triggered quite well.

In the user test, the foam and pressure sensors always came out. Therefore,  I used black tape and hot glue to fix them.

(I got attacked by the acrylic color.)

But the coloring was successful!!!

• EMOTIONS

I wrote these Chinese characters in Procreate. With Sophia and Freddie’s help, I succeeded in laser cut them out very well. We were all surprised by the accuracy and delicacy of laser cut on acrylic boards. They looked good on the cloth and played the role of instructions.

I also laser cut some English words. However, it looked very messy and was even hard to understand for my English native speaker friend. So I removed them.

• TITLE

I engraved the title on the transparent acrylic board.

D. CONCLUSIONS:

• Expectation and Reality

“Everyone has their own opinions.” – Andy

This is the biggest takeaway I got in this project

I expect my audience can relieve their sad emotions and get cured by happy emotion through my project. 

In the final presentation, I noticed some people think my project can arouse their emotions and help them relieve them after they play with it. But others thought it was not that immersive and hard to understand. I cannot satisfy all the users but accept their suggestions and ideas. I think this is what I have learnt in the process of final presentation and critique. Therefore, I accepted Gottfried’s suggestion and made an instruction and a background introduction in the final show, trying my best to show the project by conveying appropriate ideas.

In the final show, it was a pity that it was too noisy in the studio, so people couldn’t hear the sounds clearly. Based on the final presentation experience, I assumed the laptop volume was big enough falsely. But everyone still tried to get the sounds with my introduction. Moreover, my project was too fragile. Pressure sensors needed users to use some strength, but if they used too much strength, my project would easily break down. In the final show, some users were too energetic and I felt my project was on the verge of collapse… There was even a little error happening because one of the wire was pulled off by the powerful users. Fortunately, I found this problem and fixed it but some users were confused by the error and I had to explain it for many times, which caused a little unpleasant experience.

However, I was surprised that a lot of people liked my project and praised my creativity. Due to my introverted characteristics, I was planning to sit behind my project and see them play my project. However, when I saw many people were curious about my project, I couldn’t help standing up and introduced my project. Instead of telling them all of my ideas directly, I waited and saw how they explored and interacted with my project by themselves. Some of them told me their thoughts and I benefitted a lot from these ideas. Also, I had a lot of conversation with them during and after they interacted with my project. Sometimes, I gave a few instructions to lead them to explore more but I tried to control myself not to interfere too much. This was what I have learnt in the learning process – a good interactive project should speak by itself.

Overall, I’m glad that the project has almost achieved my expectations and gained many complements and likes. Especially in the finals, everyone became emotionally unstable. Their interaction with my project can effectively help them relieve their negative emotions and get “cured”. I was moved to tears when the final presentation ended because I saw many classmates loved my project. This feeling became stronger when the final show ended because I saw many people ranging from kids and the elderly got my ideas and understood me.

My tears were the best full stop of this project.

• Improvements (If I had more time…)

1. 1. Bigger structure and More emotions (positive)
   2. More animation, like changing the path of the tears going down and making it more 3D-like or mixing the tears at the bottom of the eye
   3. Add bim-bom sounds when the drops fall on the eyeball
   4. Adjust the luminance of the projector
   5. Use a stereo instead of the laptop itself to make sounds.
   6. Sounds —> Songs 

E. DISASSEMBLY:

I returned the projector and adapter to the Equipment Room and the five pressure sensors to the black cart outside the IMA studio.

I put this little box customized for the little projector on the shelf in the fabrication lab. Hope it can be made use of by future Ixlab students and save their time!!

Finally, I didn’t disassembly my project but kept it in my locker. (My heart will be broken if I tear down my project…)

F. APPENDIX

• Videos

– Documentation video with emotion subtitles

– Drop animation

– User video (Maelyn Lu)

– User video (Freddie Yang)

– Screen Recording in the final show 

• Code of Final Project: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lKTQiCWPpMu6AKFkMO_9VYmySrtK5w8Cuy7v9TDv6YM/edit?usp=sharing

• Sounds Source:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1U2J8LASSnjf3p0g3eiV3Yanioz6TQfkr?usp=sharing

From https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/search/klaxon/

A. BAMBOO – Ting&Cassandra – Prof. Andy Garcia 

B. CONTEXT AND SIGNIFICANCE

a.  Previous Research Inspiration

In the previous research, I read Chris Crawford’s article, “The Art of Interactive Design: A Euphonious and Illuminating Guide to Building Successful Software.” In this article, Chris defined interaction, as “a cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think, and speak”. Besides, I found a project that fits my imagination of an interactive project, which is Narratron, an interactive projector with a storytelling AI. It allows the audience to decide the story’s role and the storytelling’s pace. The project gives the participants the experience of being a significant role in this artwork from beginning to end. Then, it can inspire the participants’ feelings and opinions on this project.

These inspired my own definition of interactivity. I believe that interaction is reciprocal and cyclic. Action (input) and Reaction (output) need to both exist in an interactive project. The project should at first lead the users to form their own ideas about how to operate it. Then, the project can be operated and give a reaction to the action, which arouses users to think and take the next step again. The uniqueness of my project may be the reaction to every action and many implied hints. Players need to think about what to do next by noticing and thinking about the hints.

b. Recreation

We recreate the maze game in a new form. Our contribution to its development is that we combine this maze game with room escape elements. We need to complete the certain tasks to gain the passcode, get the bamboo (key), and give it to Nezuko (door). 

c. Target audience

Everyone can be my project intended for, but definitely, my project is of special value to the fans of “Demon Slayer”. We kept the setting of the characters and part of the plots in this animation. Players can play the role of the main character, Tanjiro. Because I am also a big fan of this animation, I would love to try everything about it and feel excited about the interaction I can have with this animation. Therefore, based on my imagination, almost all the fans will love it. In addition, it is also a challenging game for everyone and I hope it can attract people to watch this animation and love it.

C. CONCEPTION AND DESIGN

a. Conception

Here is our brainstorming sheet about the midterm project as follows.

We finally picked “Demon Slayer” as our theme and maze as our main form of the game. Players need to get the bamboo, which is the key of the puzzle. On their way to Nezuko, they have to power up themselves to beat the demon and get the passcode to open the barrier to get the bamboo.

b. Design and Mechanism

Here is the drawing I did in the proposal and the mechanism ideas during the building process..

c. Interaction

We first want our game to be a game of two players. One plays the main character and the other plays the bad demon to stop the first player. Therefore, we chose the speed game using two buttons. However, in this case, it’s unfair for the players. The bad demon player can only experience this speed game while the main character player can experience the whole maze, so later, we deleted this speed game and changed the game to a one-player game.

For better experience of interaction, we added a lot of figures poping up and beeping sounds after the players finish the tasks. 

d. Form, Material or Elements

MAGNETs!!! They are the soul of the mechanism in our game.

Here are the materials we used.

M/M jumper cables xn;

Flexible cables xn;

Magnet switch x3; 

Servo x5;

Magnet x18;

10k Ohm Resister x3;

Breadboard x2;

Arduino Uno x1;

220 Ohm Resister x1;

Potentiometer x1;

LED x1;

Buzzer x1;

Temperature sensor x1;

D. FABRICATION AND PRODUCTION

I did the circuit, the code, the handle stick, and half of the decorations.

And Cassandra built the main cardboard prototype and half of the decorations. She used the hot glue gun super well!!! and made a perfect maze!!

a. Cardboard

     • Prototype

I took some thinner cardboards in the trash cart. After we got the big cardboards, I drew the maze on it and Cassandra made the barriers and stuck them on it with hot glue.

I made the player figure with magnets underneath.

I took the tenon and mortise joint as a reference to make the stick more stable inside without the hot glue. Then, I used hot glue to fill the gap between the cardboard to make it firm.

The first image is the one we used for user testing. It turned out that it was too low that users were easily blocked by the messy cables. Therefore, We heightened the cardboard.

I made this little sword and this bad demon with cardboard, copper paper and tape.

I decorated the potentiometer with little arrow and the sticker.

This is the final decoration. I printed out the pattern and Cassandra glued it on the surface of the project. I decorated the front surface and added the instructions.     

b. Circuit

First day: I borrowed a bunch of sensors and the magnet switch to test their feasibility in my project.

Second day: It was the circuit with only button switches and the buzzer.

(~MESSY~)

Third day: The circuit was mostly done.

Fourth day: We cut the flexible cables and lengthened the cables of the servos, so that the players won’t be blocked by the cables.

Fifth day: A bunch of cables…

Sixth and seventh day: I spent two hours to reassemble the cables and make it tidy and stable with tapes. And I added more equipments (servos x3, LED x1) these two days.

c. Code

d. User Testing

• User Testing

Due to the unfixed circuit, some cables just unplug themselves from the breadboard (GOD! I was crying inside my heart). Therefore, I had to plug them in again fast before the user testing. Unfortunately, It was such a hurry that I mistook a few of them and the circuit didn’t work. We have to fake it and perform by ourselves…

We got a lot of suggestions from the user testing recitation.

Later, we added more magnets on the main charater figure and the stick handle to solve the “HARD TO MOVE” problem, which we thought was the crucial one. Also, we adjusted a lot of barriers’s length to make the room to pass bigger.

• Final Critique

-MORE INSTRUCTIONS!!

For the stick handle, people may have no idea how to play the game with it. We should add more instructions about it.

-WIDER ROAD!!

I believe this critique was also based on the “HARD TO MOVE” problem. We need stronger magnets! Or more smooth surface!

-PURE GAME WORLD!!

Our original idea is the pure game world with only the stick handle. Later, based on the limited time for building this project, we had to give up this idea. 

E. CONCLUSIONS

a. Goal

Making it an INTERACTIVE game!

I think we did it. We can see that our players successfully feel the happiness of winning the game. However, if there were more randomness in the game, it would be perfect. Now, the players just followed the instructions and sometimes our hints to complete the game. We want to give them more surprise than just figures poping up, although I think the poping-up already surprised them a lot.

b. Improvement

If there were more time……

• I would first decorate the stick and make it look like a sword with a handle and add some instructions about how to use this stick to play.

Cassandra made the sword. However, we forgot about it. If we make it thicker and more stable, it can be a very good handle.

• I would make the game more RANDOM and FLEXIBLE. For now, every step of this game is set up. There is only one solution to the puzzle. If there are more random traps, this game can have more possibilities. For example, it can include a trap that reduces the time limit by 30 seconds or a potential bonus that extends the time limit.

c. Take-away

SUCCESSFUL PROJECT but HARM TO BODY

• SUCCESSFUL PROJECT

A successful pair-work project needs good communication and cooperation. I’m very glad that we had very good communication and divided our work according to our ability. It went very well and was even beyond my expectations.

• HARM TO BODY

We must consider the time we have to do the project. There was only more than one week for us to start and complete the project. Staying up late every day led to low energy in the midterms and less time for other courses.

F. Reference

• Crawford, Chris. “The Art of Interactive Design: A Euphonious and Illuminating Guide to Building Successful Software.” Amazon, No Starch Press, 2003, www.amazon.com/Art-Interactive-Design-Euphonious-Illuminating/dp/1886411840. 

• Visnjic, Filip. “Narratron – Shadow Play with a Storytelling AI.” CreativeApplications.Net, 11 July 2023, www.creativeapplications.net/objects/narratron-shadow-play-with-a-storytelling-ai/. 

🩷 Title: Barbie AI 

💞 Group members: Ammna Khan, Cassy Hu, Tina Xu, Tianmi Wang, Ting Yang, Vilius Schmidt, Boyan Peng.

🧞‍♀️ Concept

The idea was originally from Cassy’s idea of Barbie’s magic wardrobe. This artifact was based on the world in the first story: The Veldt. The world there has super intelligent technology and the characters in the story have a house equipped with all intelligent furniture. Inspired by the people’s problem every day which is choosing our outfit of the day and the recent movie “Barbie”, we came up with the idea of Barbie’s AI dream wardrobe that can help choose your outfit according to the trend, weather, and mood every day.

💘 Process

We have 3 group meetings in total. Everyone actively joined every meeting and devoted a lot of efforts. We naturally allocated our work and everyone was willing to work and did a good job.

👙 1st Group Meeting — 9/18 : Idea Brainstorm

Everyone picked one of our favorite ideas of artifacts that we constructed for the three stories. My favorite idea was a machine that can help me reduce fat and shape muscles. It was later discussed that could be added to the Barbie AI because it helped make a perfect body for showing the charm of the outfit. But we don’t have enough time to realize it.

Then, we voted for the most interactive and creative artifact and improved it. We had a brainstorm and wrote down the questions we had in a shared Google doc. Then, we answered every question together with as many possible answers as we could.

This document contained everything of our artifact.

👚 2nd Group Meeting — 9/22: Design and 1/2 of Building

We started to make the prototype relevantly late compared to other groups. At first, we struggled a lot to find the materials because other groups had taken most of them. Luckily, we found a big cardboard box, a huge display board (very neat and complete), and some foam boards. According to the materials we found, we started to design the appearance of the wardrobe.

We used the big cardboard box as the base. We cut off one side of the box to let the user step in more conveniently. Also, we wanted to keep it stand stably, so we connected two sides of the box with one cardboard at the bottom. Then, we planned to glue the display board on the box to make the wardrobe taller. We colored one side of each display board pink to make it more “Barbie”, put it on the shelf, and left it to dry itself for a weekend.

After the building of prototype, I came up with the idea that we should use little cardboard to show the weather and the mood. So I drew the crying emoji and the cloud and Vilius drew the smiling emoji and the sun.

👛 3rd Group Meeting — 9/24: 2/2 of Building and Rehearsal

I didn’t joined the building part but I joined the decoration part. I came up with the idea to add some bowknots. I loved what they decorated, especially the fluffy clouds. The drawing of the circuits was also amazing.

Here are the pictures and a video of the decorated wardrobe:

After all the decorations, we started to write the script. Our first very general and brief script is as follows:

We kept improving our script through rehearsal. When we had the rehearsal twice, we started timing. Then, we found out it was a little bit short, so we added some transitions and the beginning and the ending. 

🎀 Showcase

   Special thanks to Amelia Shao 🎥

Retell and interpret the showcase:

At first, Tina, and Vivian had a little girl talk to introduce the little trouble we met every day, which also implied the purpose of the artifact. I raised a question to trigger Tina’s showing the artifact. Then, Tina took us to her house and showed us the Barbie AI. Tina’s father and Tina introduced the Barbie AI to us. As a “bad” friend, like always mocking and picking, I mentioned the practicality. Tina responded to this and further explained it. After the introduction and interpretation, Tina went into the Barbie AI to show how it works. Then, Ammna and Boyan, as part of the Barbie AI, showed the working process. Especially, Ammna used the robot-like voice to interpret how the Barbie AI worked from the perspective of the AI itself, making it fun and understandable. At last, Tina (Cassy) came out with a pretty dress and the Barbie AI rated this outfit on her and detected her mood again to see if she liked this outfit. For the ending, we used the plot that I, Tina and Vivian had a class in a minute and rushed out, which is natural.

💗 Success

I think our artifact does fit my identification of interaction in my research, which is that “interaction” is the action that makes two objects have reciprocal influence. It was especially shown when Tina changed the outfit that the Barbie AI made, AI scanned the mood that Tina had now for this new outfit. It is like a response from the user to the artifact and the response will change how the artifact will work in the future.

To make the performance easier, we picked two of us to play the role of the girl who will change her clothes, so that they don’t need to change clothes on the stage. Tina and Cassy are of the same height and are perfect to be the main characters because they are all English native speakers and extroverts. It turned out to be successful to make this choice. We saved our time and avoided the risk.

For the performance, we picked the form of sitcom to make it easy for the audience to understand what we meant. It was quite successful because I asked one of my friends under the stage and she said it was fun and friendly to the audience. We all have excellent acting skills!

💓 Failures

We still need to face a lot of problems if this artifact is put into reality,  like the unemployment of designers leading to the effects of monopolies and,  most importantly, the lack of human fashion creativity. Also, we can improve our performance by showing these issues in it. We only showed how this artifact worked but we didn’t show any of the consequences it would cause. 

About the energy question that Professor Andy raised, we talked about this when we had our first meeting. I came up with this question and we had some thoughts about it and wanted to make it fun. My groupmates also considered it a good question. However, we were completely lost in designing and building the artifact and having rehearsals because we started later than others and we didn’t leave much time. We forgot to rethink the brainstorming questions. It was really a pity. We could have presented more interesting ideas.

💝 Future Improvements

Spare more time to build the artifact! Think about the script more comprehensively! 

🤩 Peer Feedback on Another Group 

Title: DROOZ Visualizer 🎷

Showcase

Critical analysis and assessment:

Their showcase definitely met the criteria of the assignment well.  I really love their design and their performance.

First, my eyes were caught by their artifact. It was so delicate. They have a lot of small parts and they are very good at drawing. I love their painting. I can’t even imagine how much effort they have put into this project.

Also, I love their performance. They had the instrument. I enjoyed this performance not only visually but also audibly.

Besides, I could tell that they had some critical thinking about their artifact from their performance. It had two users. It worked for one but didn’t work for the other one. Nothing is perfect. This part of the performance left the audience a lot of room to imagine, like why didn’t it work for the second user. She didn’t like the saxophone? or she didn’t like how this player played the saxophone? 

However, I was thinking that because this was designed in the world of the second story. The users became happy but what about the saxophonist? It was obvious that part of this artifact’s energy source was labor. Is he happy in the box? If there is anything to improve, my suggestion will be that they can add some plots on the saxophonist to show his mood, which may trigger more thinking of this role.