Author: Malika Wang

Exercise 1: Make a Processing Etch A Sketch

The schematic for this sketch is simple. As is shown below, I connected the left side of the breadboard to the 5V and GROUND on the Arduino Uno with red and black wires, and connected the two bottom legs of each potentiometer to the power and ground respectively. Also, I connected the top leg of each potentiometer to A0 and A1 with white wires to send signals to the Arduino.

Exercise 2: Make a musical instrument with Arduino

The schematic for this sketch is even simpler than the previous one. I connected the positive side of the buzzer to pin 7 on the Arduino and the negative side to GROUND. I make it the way that when the spacebar is pressed, the buzzer beeps. And when the spacebar is released, the buzzer quiets down. The frequency of the tone depends on the mouseX and mouseY. The further the mouse is away from the point (0,0), the higher the frequency in which the buzzer beeps.

During my group project, I defined interaction as a conversation between two actors who alternately ‘listen, think, and speak’ to each other. I still regard those projects that are built to give certain feedback or are programmed to act in a certain way when exposed to certain movement to be not interactive. During my midterm projects, after the user-testing session to be more exact, I recognized one very important standard for a project to be interactive – user feedback. An interactive project has to be able to make the user think, and takes the result of that thinking as feedback for itself.

I researched two projects. The first one is Chatty Coasters. As is described, ‘Chatty Coasters are interactive coasters that listen for silences in conversation and insert provocative questions into them.’ It fits my definition of interaction in that the questions it raises make the users think. It does not fit my definition in that the interaction is among the users present, instead of between the user and itself. Therefore, under my definition, it can be called an interaction-promoted project.

picture for Chatty Coasters, found in the previous link

The other project that mostly does not fit my definition is Eikasía / Is This Real?. It does not align with my definition of interaction in that the user cannot change what they will see depending on the previous feedback it gives. No chance to change means no need for thinking. Some may argue that this project may lead the viewers to revisit Plato’s Analogy of the Divided Line. But Plato’s proposal exists already. This project merely takes what’s on the book and makes it real. The idea that created it may be interactive. This project is not.

picture for Eikasía / Is This Real?, found in the previous link

My new definition of interaction is a scenario where all participants (including the project itself) may give and receive feedback alternately and improve self accordingly. It is like an improvisational dance for two. To make it good, each dancer shall take his/her partner’s movements into account. Therefore, my emphasis will be on the ‘alternate’ part.

Recitation Exercise

I chose to develop my work from the last recitation. I wanted to make the pattern move endlessly, so I used the ‘%’ function to make the translation smooth. The translation part was easy, but the pattern sometimes appeared suddenly instead of smoothly. It took me the entire class to figure out what went wrong and finally, I realized it was the range of the pattern. To be more specific, the pattern did not cover the moving range. So, I modified the data and made the canvas smaller.

This is my code.

 Recitation Homework

The only difficulty I ran into was that when I was making the canvas’ edges into a border, I wanted to take the size of the circle into the consideration as well. To be more specific, I wanted that when a circle is approaching the border, its size at the second it touches the border would be its maximum size when remaining at that position. I tried a lot of methods, including changing the maximum when hit the border, but I found that the size of the circle has to change constantly and the border could not limit the size of the circle. So, I just made the border into a fixed one that can contain the maximum size of the circle.

This is my code.

 

Step 1: Choose an image to be your motif

image from: https://pixabay.com/vectors/pattern-cube-3d-design-black-1350343/

At first, I wanted to create an image similar to the NYU library floor in New York, which looks like this:

but it was a little bit too hard for me so I decided to draw a square version of it.

Step 2: Draw your image in Processing

I wanted to duplicate the motif I found. I spent the entire class trying to find the pattern so that I can draw a line of squares at one time and I succeeded. 

I learnt some Processing basics last semester but I learnt it in Python. So I used Python in this recitation. I perceive Processing as a good way to create animation. Drawing is just the first step.

CONTEXT AND SIGNIFICANCE

Through my previous research on the group project, I recognized that interactive projects were either made to suit certain people’s needs or just intellectual games. Nathan and I preferred something fun, so we decided on creating a game.

CONCEPTION AND DESIGN

During our research on Arduino game projects, our eyes were caught by the famous Buzz-Wire game. In this traditional game, the player needs to move across the wire without letting the handle touch the wire. Each time the handle touches the wire, the buzzer will ‘beeeee’ to alarm the player. To better fit this game into our definition of interaction, we replaced the buzzer by several lights. Each time the handle touches the wire, one LED will light up to make the environment brighter so that the player may get a clearer sight and adjust the handle better. This way, the player may think based on the feedback he/she gets. To make the game more challenging, we 3D printed two cylinders to serve as the observation point so that the viewing window for the player would be limited. Also, we made the game contained inside a box so the environment started to be dark and with increasing times of handle touching the wire, the environment would get brighter in the process. We thought about making the view window into a simple window-shaped box, but it did not serve our original purpose of making the game more challenging.

As you may see, the game was very difficult when we first finished it. We made the wire inside easier so that it is winnable.

FABRICATION AND PRODUCTION

During our user-test session, many players gave us feedback on the position of the lights, need of a reset button, and means to show either they were winning or losing.

Therefore, we added a reset button on the top of the box, we adjusted the position of the lights so that the players may see them through the viewing window we made, and we put two more LEDs on the top of the box to indicate if the player wins or loses.

CONCLUSIONS

We made this project to bring fun to our audiences’ lives. It aligns with my definition of interaction in that the feedback it provides stimulates the players to think, ‘how can I not touch the wire?’, ‘how can I win this game?’. Also, the process of the box getting brighter ‘improves’ the environment for the players so that they can adjust their approach accordingly. The only misleading information was that many players perceived LEDs lighting up as an indication of good performance. If we had more time, we would probably alter the game into LEDs turning off when touching the wire. Also, we would make the reset button more accessible, and leave the red and green LEDs inside the box so that the player may realize they win or lose on their own.

From this project, I recognized the importance of user-test sessions. As the developer, we had a clear thought about what we were making. Therefore, we did not foresee many confusions that our players later raised. Anyway, I hope this project had brought our players some fun as we intended it would do.