Month: October 2020

Circuit Documentations

My partner and I built one drawing machine this recitation. Since the code is given to us along with the circuit diagram, the building process wasn’t hard. For the step of assembling the mechanical arms, the 3D printed component doesn’t fit so well at first. By manually adjusting the size, we succeeded in building the arms and drew one “artwork”. The arms didn’t hold the pen so tightly that sometimes the pen couldn’t draw exactly what we want. But at least we made something artistic.

Answers to the Questions

1.What kind of machines would you be interested in building? Add a reflection about the use of actuators, the digital manipulation of art, and the creative process to your blog post.

I would like to build a pair of earmuffs or something that can reduce the loudness of the environment according to the users’ will. For I want to address the problem of sound pollution, which is one serious concern damaging people’s health. Though we may able to ignore some sound in noisy areas, our ears are still exposed to the voice and damaged because of that.

Thus, I want to use the motors or servos as the actuator to control the earmuffs and voice sensors to detect the loudness in the environment. In this way, the earmuffs can automatically turned to block the extra noice in the environment if the sensor detects such sound.

2.Choose an art installation mentioned in the reading ART + Science NOW, Stephen Wilson (Kinetics chapter). Post your thoughts about it and make a comparison with the work you did during this recitation. How do you think that the artist selected those specific actuators for his project?

This art installation creates sounds with metal rings raising and falling. The whole process of making sounds is just like the working of a system, and by building such system with metal structures and rings, the sound produced can be regarded as the output or expression of such “mechanism”.

Both this Centripetal Sound Machines and the mechanical arms I built this recitation used motors. I used motors to control the pen and draw things while motors are used in another way to make sound in that art installation. Though motors can only move in one particular way, which is to rotate, but with different devices connected to it, there can be various of outputs in very different forms. To use actuators properly, the reacts in different fields can be joint together to present brand new interactions and creations.

Five Senses

I am in a group along with Mia, Ray, Wayne and Campbell. We five together came up with the artifact called five senses, which is a mask that can record the five senses of the user ( tactile sense, visual sense, auditory sense,  olfactory sense and taste) and transmit them to another user later on.

Origins and Background

Our artifact, the mask called “five senses”, is originated from the story of Newton’s Sleep. In our discussion about the artifact, the first idea wasn’t actually the five senses mask. I t was a pair of glasses that can navigate visually imparied people as well as reading aloud written down informations. This idea came from one character in the story called Esther, who has bad eyesight and needs surgery for her eyes. However, after doing researches upon that artifact, we found out that similar inventions has already been created with the name of AngelEye.

So we tried to make some improvements and adjustments to the glasses to make it unique. My artifact for Newton’s Sleep was a pair of AR glasses for citizens to see the scenery on Earth. Combining these ideas together, we finally came up with the artifact of a special mask to record people’s senses. To put it into the story, this mask can help the citizens who are living out of earth to regain an experience of lives on Earth, for the elder people are missing that memory.

Building and Performing

The building part isn’t that hard as all we need to do is cutting a mask. We used cardboard and paper for that.

Instead, we focused more on the performance and the story of it. To better illustrate the function, we used a drama way to perform a murder case. To tell the story in short, a man was killed with the five sense mask on, then a girl passing by found the body and put the mask on out of curiosity, then she experienced the whole process just happened and thus found out the real murderer. In this story, we tried to illustrate that the mask can represent the five senses to the user by replaying the murder case in front of the girl. For the story involves fierce quarrel and drama-like killing part, we rehearsed a lot and polished the performance by changing details and dialogues from time to time.

And here is the video of our rehearsal.

About the Interaction

Intuitively, the five senses mask involves two parts of interaction. Firstly, the user interacts with the mask to record the five senses, the mask would sense whatever the user has got with the outsider world. And secondly, the mask interacts with the another user to present and share the recorded senses and feelings.

But I would also think that this special mask creates different kinds of interaction. By regarding the mask not as one object of the interaction but the tunnel, we have the two users actually interacting with each other. The two users shared “part of the memory” using the mask. However, this won’t actually meet with my definition of Interaction in the pervious documentation. Since the later user can’t actually give feedback to the first user as the interaction doesn’t happen simultaneously. In this sense, I may here raise an improvement  as that two users wearing the masks can share senses with each other simultaneously.

Last but not least, from another point of view, to some extent we can say that the later user is interacting with the scene he/she senses through the mask. But the same flaw exists that the scene can’t give feedback (output) to the later user. So the improvement mentioned above may also be adapted here to complete the interaction process.

Successes and Failures

For the successes, I think my group has came up with a really interesting and helpful idea. Though we performed the mask within a murder case, there can be various usages of the mask (if it can really be created). Also, I would think that the drama is a nice way to illustrate the functions of the mask and the murder scenario is  unique and attracting.

For the failures, I think there are many aspects we can improve and do better. First, we didn’t spend much time in building the artifact, though the mask is easy to create, we could have chances to further perfect it and having it shown some of the functions. Secondly, our story of performance may be too complicated and not easy to understand within a five-minute performance. We didn’t find the best way to present the function of “having the five senses of another person”. What’s more, there exists some flaws in the designing of the mask. For example, one professor raised one question that what would happen if one get sleep with the mask on. We actually wasn’t sure about the answer because we hadn’t really think about how the mask would sense and record everything. By completing the setting and details of the mask could help us further understand it.

Review on The Helmet of Emotions

The Helmet of Emotions is a helmet that enables people to regain their emotions when putting it on. People can feel the emotion of happy, anger, sympathy, sad and so on. For the background story, this artifact is based on Newton’s Sleep. It is said that humans in the story regard emotions as useless and they don’t show these feelings up in daily life. So the helmet is invented to let people regain their emotions towards everything and have a normal human live.

I think this artifact is pretty relevant to the story as they looked deep into the personality and characteristics of the citizens in Newton’s Sleep. Though I think people there may not be willing to actually use this helmet, I think this invention is creative and interesting. Furthermore, this helmet also raises a deeper social problem that people tends to be indifference and selfish when interacting with others, especially when communicating through the Internet. This invention enables us to pay more attention to this problem.

For the artifact they built and the performance, it really amazed me a lot that they got balloons with different colors representing different emotions, bursting one balloon means the showing of one certain emotion. I think this design is truly unique and understandable. The performance illustrated the invention clearly. I wasn’t sure why the characters were speaking and reacting emotionlessly at first, but when the helmet came out the balloon bursted, I got the key idea of the invention loud and clear. Also, the performers dealt with the emergency (the balloon won’t burst when pulling the trigger) on the stage calmly and actively, making the emergency not flaws but outstanding points for the whole performance.

 I think the artifact and the performance are already pretty nice. For some tiny suggestions, I would think that building the helmet easier to use (easier to burst the balloon when pulling the trigger) may further perfect the performance. Also, at the beginning part of the performance, there was a long introduction to the background by one speaking, I may suggest that convey the background knowledge by the way of act may be more intuitive and attracting. Overall, I think The Helmet of Emotions is a creative and interesting artifact along with an excellent performance.

Circuit Documentations

In this recitation, I chose the vibration sensor and built a circuit around it. With the help of the vibration sensor introduction on Arduino, building the circuit isn’t difficult. Instead of using the code provided in the example, I used the code learned on Thursday’s class and made some changes to it. I used the map() function to let the vibration sensor control the frequency of buzzer and the brightness of LED. There was one problem when I used pin 9 as the output of buzzer and pin 11 as the output of LED, only the buzzer can work, while the LED had no light. I asked the professor for help, we checked all the equipments and coding part to be fine. After looking up on the internet, we found out that the timer was conflicting the output of LED when using pin 9 and 11 at the same time. So we then used pin 5 instead of 11 and the whole circuit worked well.

const int vibration = 0;

const int buzzer = 9;

const int light = 5;

int brightness = 0;

int value = 0;

int loud = 0;


void setup() {

  Serial.begin(9600);
  
  pinMode (light, OUTPUT);

}

void loop() {

  value = analogRead(vibration);

  loud = map(value, 0, 400, 1, 24);

  brightness = map(value, 0, 400, 0, 255);


  Serial.println(brightness);

  tone(buzzer, 440 * loud, 1000);

  analogWrite(light, brightness);
  
  delay(100);
}

Answers to the Questions

1. What did you intend to assemble in the recitation exercise? If your sensor/actuator combination were to be used for pragmatic purposes, who would use it, why would they use it, and how could it be used?

I intend to built a circuit that the buzzer and LED can have reactions to the knock and press of the vibration sensor. I think this circuit can be used as an alarm in real life. When certain object is touched, there will have sounds and lights in order to alert the user. For example, this can be equipped on a safe box containing dangerous objects like lighter and iron. If the child at home accidentally touches the safe box, there will immediately be noice and lights to alert the parents as well as the child.

2. Code is often compared to following a recipe or tutorial.  Why do you think that is?

I think that the computer will act according to the code given, just like chief will cook with the recipe or students do work depending on the tutorial. The code is the guideline for the computer to operate. Just like recipe and tutorial, the code itself would run or function, but it can tell the computer to run accordingly.

3. In Language of New Media, Manovich describes the influence of computers on new media. In what ways do you believe the computer influences our human behaviors?

No doubt that computers have changed human life completely in nearly every aspects. Human now depends on computer a lot for so many things. Human let the computers to do many basic things instead of manually. For the most simple example, with a powerful calculator, we no need to do calculations by ourself, and our ability of calculating may even decline because of the computer. We tend to type in words instead of writing it down on paper, so we may feel weird when holding a real pen to sign the name. Therefore, I think many basic things human used to practice has been replaced by computers, this is for sure more convenient and efficient, but at the same time, it also means that human may lose the ability to those basic things since there exists fewer chances for us to practice.