For this project, I want to create an interactive monitor that receives input from the audience regarding their opinions on Chinese politics and censorship. For example, they may be asked true/false or yes/no questions, and then instructed to press a key (T/F or Y/N) corresponding with their answer. After one response that is negative towards Chinese interests, the screen will display a warning. After a second negative response, attention-drawing lights and sounds will be activated, although the user will still have full ability to continue answering questions. I want to observe how successful these deterrents are in conditioning the students to choose less inflammatory answers. Given the recent press on the topic of self-censorship at NYU Shanghai, I think this interaction pushes students to consider what they will or won’t say and why that is. The statement made by this project is particularly relevant and applicable to attendees of this university as we live and study in China and, in doing so, give up certain personal freedoms.
Robot Poet
Similar to “The Nautilus” exhibit that I found during my research stage, which utilized touch-activated poles to create collaborative, audience-generated music, I want to use light or motion-activated sensors to generate spoken-word poetry. Each sensor could correspond with a particular word or phrase, although this may be limiting. Alternatively, with enough sensors, there could be respective groups that correspond with nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc and allow the audience to pick and choose in order to build an abstract piece of writing. I like the idea of digital media projects that allow the audience to create original creative works through the set of interactions that occur. It is relevant to a student audience because it allows for and encourages cross-discipline engagement by blurring the line between Interactive Media Arts and Literature or Creative Writing.
Etch-a-Sketch 2.0
This device would utilize a simple Arduino circuit paired with the Processing application in order to make drawing easy and entertaining. By twisting a set of knobs, users can navigate lines to create sketches on screen, which are then saved or erased with the press of a button. There are previous iterations of this device online, so I would want to find some way to take it a step further, perhaps by incorporating more than the standard two control knobs. This way, users could experiment with color, stroke, opacity, and other design elements as well. It is relevant to a college-age audience because the Etch-a-Sketch is a toy that many of us played with growing up, making this experience intuitive, fun, and nostalgic. Like the Robot Poet, it allows the audience to create individual art through the interaction.
The Chronus exhibition really helped me gain a better understanding of how the skills that we are learning in class can be applied on a larger scale to create meaningful art. Because the pieces incorporated technology, they gained an element of interactivity, allowing the users to not only appreciate the art but also, in certain cases, engage with it and elicit a response in return. I particularly enjoyed Zhang Hua’s “Artificial Intuition,” which moves in reaction to the people around it. As the description noted, “an artificially intelligent algorithm controls the installation’s sensors and motors and enables robotic tentacles to predict movement and block people as they pass.” I watched as various people approached the exhibit and instantly felt compelled to engage with it, walking around and under the “tentacles,” and adjusting their movements to stay out of reach.
In my research, I came across a project called “The Nautilus,” which I think captures the idea of interaction quite well. As described on the project website, “The installation is a field of 96 touch-activated poles that when activated, create a symphony of sound and light. While a single touch produces one melody, simultaneous interactions with the installation create a complex, layered chorus. Each pole also contains a series of lights that respond to the array of tones created by the installation.” This higher level of interaction not only encourages the audience to enter into a cycle of reactive input and output with the exhibit, but also allows them to display their own creative expression, and even cooperate with people around them to produce a jointly creative composition. The exhibit uses both sound and light to draw users in. It is also built on a scale that lets people immerse themselves completely, wandering around the various poles and making music as they go. For my final project, I want to draw on this example in that my product allows for creative expression on the part of those that interact with it.
I also really like Minimaform’s “Petting Zoo,” which is somewhat similar to the “Artificial Intuition” exhibit at Chronus. The project utilizes “Artificial intelligent creatures [that] have been designed with the capacity to learn and explore behaviors through interaction with participants.” Essentially, a number of “creatures” with tentacles extending from the ceiling respond like live animals as people pet them, move around them, or otherwise engage in interaction. The creatures will even react in boredom if the users are not being particularly active. The goal of the piece is ultimately to force extensive back-and-forth between the artwork and the audience.
One digital artwork I enjoy but find less successful in terms of interaction is “The Listening Post” by Ben Rubin and Mark Hanson. This piece consists of “a real-time visualization of thousands of ongoing online conversations” that appear on numerous screens. It also employs a text-to-speech function that brings audio into the picture. While this artwork is very thought-provoking, it does not require the users to do anything more than look and then respond internally.
I think my midterm was interactive on a base level, but a bit too simple to really challenge users. It was such an intuitive game that, even though players reacted to the outputs generated by their actions, it didn’t push them to think, create, or respond in any sort of meaningful way. Therefore, for my final, I want to move into a higher level of interaction that results in multiple cycles of input and output between audience and product. I also want to push the audience to generate their own creative expressions using my product as a medium. My definition of interaction has definitely expanded to take into account the many possibilities of exchange between man and machine.
For my interactive animation, I wanted to step away from my creation in Recitation 5 but I still wanted to continue to play around with shapes and design. I really liked the transform functions that were included in the class slides, like float and translate, so I employed those as my main focus. To bring in a level of interaction between the user and the keyboard, I added an element that changes the color of the background every time you press a key. Overall, I think my animation is visually pleasing, if not particularly useful.
Step 1: The first step, in which we had to create a stationary circle in the middle of the page, was just drawing on what we did in the last recitation, and very easy to complete.
Step 2: The second step was a bit more difficult for me to figure out, and I ended up trying several lines of code that didn’t work before I found a way to do it. At first, I attempted to use if/else statements that would draw on “d = d+1” to expand the circle and “d = d-1” to contract it. However, while this succeeded in getting the circle to expand out within my specified dimensions, it left the circle stalled at that maximum point, unable to reverse and shrink again. Eventually, I switched to use a boolean expression instead, so that, once the radius reaches 0 at its minimum or 150 at its maximum, the condition switches and the circle goes from shrinking to growing and vice versa.
Step 3: I couldn’t make this step work exactly as I wanted to. It was difficult to figure out how to make the colors progress in rainbow order, so I went to look at the rainbow gradient background code that we did during class in hopes that that would point me in the right direction. In the end, the best that I could figure out was how to make the circle fill with randomly selected colors as it expanded and contracted.
Step 4: This was by far the most difficult step, because I was least familiar with how to use the keyPressed function and I think I will need some more practice to master it.
This recitation, along with the exercises we have been walking through in class, has taught me more and more about how to structure code within Processing. I have found many times that I lose particular outcomes in the animation when I reorder the code, or place certain lines in the wrong place. For example, I have accidentally stuck variable declarations in void draw() when needing to use them in void keyPressed(). This is something for me to keep in mind as I work.
The most interesting functions I used for this recitation were rotate, scale, and translate, which all create some really cool visual effects. I also enjoyed using keyPressed in order to add an element of interaction that keeps the user engaged with the animation and lets them become an active participant in how it plays out.
I chose Vasily Kandinsky’s Bright Unity because I love the way he plays with shapes and colors. I think the abstract nature of his art allows a lot of room for interpretation by the viewer in terms of what meaning is derived from the particular arrangement of objects.
I wanted to use Processing to create my own representation of Kandinsky’s work, using similar objects and designs while not copying his piece exactly. As far as my methods, I began with some of the larger shapes that didn’t require as much attention to placing. From there, I added in all of the other intersecting elements that needed to be coded specifically to meet or overlap at particular points on the grid.
My final creation is similar to the original in that it uses a variety of shapes and lines, some overlapping or in parallel with each other. Like Kandinsky, I used a large triangle as my central focus, then build on it from there.
The primary differences are in the complexities of the final products. Because of the time constraints, my drawing doesn’t feature as many shapes as the original. I was also unable to include some of the more complicated objects, like the blue and orange arcs that taper off or the sectioned off circle and triangle pattern on the bottom right side.
Drawing in Processing was a very productive means of realizing my designs. For the most part, it was easy to create any sort of shape that I wanted, although I did have a little trouble with creating a semicircle, and ended up with the yellow Pac-Man shape instead. The drawing process was intuitive, but it did require a bit of effort to make the calculations of where to place each point, especially because I wanted many of the shapes to be perfectly lined up, or overlapping, or moving parallel to each other. I found that I ran the code after every new shape or color I tried to include, just to troubleshoot and see if it looked the way I wanted to. There were a few times when I wasn’t sure if the coordinates I was inputting were exactly where I wanted the shape to end up, so I would approximate the positions, then correct based off of the display. All in all, I enjoyed playing around with the different possibilities of the software, and how easy it was to change locations, sizes, colors, etc. of the objects.
After a group project dealing with such heavy topics as climate change, the destruction of the environment, and declining quality of life for many people, I knew I wanted a bit of a lighter focus for the midterm, so Chloe and I decided to make a game.
However, since the buzzwire game has been done before, as shown above, we wanted to add a collaborative twist by making it a two-person experience. In my research, I couldn’t find any examples of the game being collaborative. Early on, we also considered making two wire tracks for single-players so that people could race simultaneously. However, we were ultimately more interested in the idea of both users having to balance the force of the other, which can be felt pulling on their control of the loop’s speed and maneuvering, by adjusting and learning to work together without explicitly speaking to each other about how to approach the course.
In my last project, there wasn’t much response generated from the user after the computer output, so I wanted to add an increased level of interaction in this game by really trying to provoke strong reactions in the players.
The “Don’t Touch Me” buzzwire game was intended for a wide variety of users and circumstances, from school children developing fine motor skills and cooperation to coworkers or peers that want a fun, simple team-building exercise. During user testing, it was also brought up that our game could be used for couples, or as an almost meditative single-user activity, since it requires so much focus on the task at hand.
We wanted the game to be understood very intuitively, so we designed it with long handles on either side of the course and a one-way track, which we hoped would clue the user in to its purpose. We used chopsticks for the handles, an object that is already heavily associated with manual manipulation. We also added obvious negative-response visual and auditory output (a buzzer, a line of text that said “Hit,” and a red LED) to signal when the user had made an error. For the wire and loop, we had to use that particular metal material so they would respond when they touched each other. For our base, we used cardboard because we did not have the tools at our disposal to make it from wood instead. If we were to do another iteration of the project, we would build a sturdier base and then drill through to place the wire. We would also place the LEDs directly on the gameboard rather than on a mini breadboard, which was then affixed to the board with tape. This setup would also allow us to conceal the wires and the Arduino circuit more neatly.
The user testing was probably the most helpful part of the designing process. We got a lot of feedback that we incorporated into our final product. Right off the bat, people knew intuitively how to play the game and were excited about the difficulty of completing the course without touching the wire. Some people thought it might be easier as a single-player game, but acknowledged that it was an interesting challenge to balance the actions of another player.
Many users wanted higher stakes to the game, like something to indicate that they had won or lost. In response, we tried to code victory music to play when they reached the end of the course, but it was much more difficult than expected to integrate it with the other code we had already written, so we were ultimately unable to include it. We did, however, have the computer show “Hit! You lose.” whenever the wire was touched. We also added the red LED after user testing to reinforce the output from the buzzer and give the user another indication that they had made an error. Some users were confused about the green LED serving as a timer, since it only came on and then turned off after 30 seconds to indicate the end of the game. For the final product, we changed the code to have the light blink with increasing speed to add pressure to the user. We also made both LEDs more central and easier for the players to see, since before they were just off to the side and could be missed. Finally, we struggled a few times during testing with wires we had taped coming apart, which kept the buzzer and LED from working, so we soldered them together.
Above photos show before and after user testing.
I think all of the changes we made after user testing were very effective. They made the game both more entertaining and easier to understand.
In terms of significant failures and successes, we had several. The first time we got the whole circuit working, and the buzzer went off as soon as the wire and loop touched, we were very excited. We were also able to get the victory music and LED control working separately. However, one of our biggest failures was integrating all of the code into one cohesive program, which ended up being much more challenging than we anticipated. We had to rework a lot of what we had written, and weren’t able to include everything we had hoped to.
This project definitely aligns with my definition of interaction: the exchange between human and computer in which both sides receive information from the other, process it, and then create a response, communicating in turn. The output of the buzzer sound and the red LED flash indicate to the users that they have done something wrong in touching the wire. The users absorb this information, then respond by maneuvering the handles more carefully. The users also respond to the increasing speed of the green LED’s flashing by moving through the course more quickly. Ideally, to add another level of interaction and make it more complex, we would add more stimulus for the users, such as the handles vibrating to add difficulty and force even further strategy development in the gameplay.
In the end, the audience’s reaction to the finished game was essentially what we had anticipated. They responded with excitement and a competitive spirit to the computer’s triggered outputs, wanting to try again and do better in order to master the game. As mentioned earlier, there are several things we would add if we had more time to develop this project further: victory music, vibrating handles, a sturdier base. To go even further, it would be cool to have different gameplay options, like a single-player mode that used the vibrating handles to challenge the user and had a shorter time limit, or a three-life mode in which the user could hit the wire thrice before losing the game.
Through this experience, I learned more about what users want from an interactive game. Positive and negative rewards, such as a warning buzzer or victory music, may seem small and insignificant, but they are huge in determining how enthusiastically a player responds to the interaction and how likely they are to want to keep engaging with the game.
