Category: Interaction Lab

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Final Project Proposal by Hangkai Qian

Idea 1  “Cat”

The inspiration comes from the Online Pet system. There are many websites that contain a pet raising system, like QQ penguin, (picture) which requires you to feed, shower and play some games to interact with it. However, we find it now so interactive—the pet is only in the screen and you will feel unreal to raise it, and also, after the first glance, you will lose interest on it since you need to “take care ”of it for a long time and gain nothing but the increased data of “happiness of penguin”. That’s why the project failed several months ago.

 the system  

As a result, what we want to do is divide into 3 different levels: the first is, building a real cat(or other pets);the second is to make the device have the mobility and the ability to store information; the third, which seems even harder, is to connect the system to the Internet, so that it can be a way to socialize, just like what QQ did.

The first level seems more realistic to realize (the fundamental function of the pet) and the cat is connected to the computer.

  1. Feeding function. To make the pet alive and be happy, you have to give something to the cat to eat. We will use a bowl for you to put “food” in—and as soon as the force sensor sensed something in the bowl, the cat will come to “eat” it. And the screen of the computer will show a full stomach image
  2. Touching function. To make your pets happy, you have to touch it every 20 minutes or the value of happiness will fall down. Once you successfully touched it, there will be some small games.
  3. Playing function. Due to the limitation, the function will mostly base on the computer, like you play some small games like chasing balls with your cat, it will be happier.

The second level is to give the cat the ability to move without wires, and as soon it is connected to the computer, the data stored inside it will be automatically uploaded to the computer.

The third level all about computer, but I have no idea how can we upload the data to the Internet…

Idea 2 Bouncing Ball Competition

The second proposal is a game and the inspiration comes from the traditional bouncing ball example. I planned to divide the window into two parts: the left part is red and the right part is blue and there is one ball of a different color bouncing in the space. There will be a block moving on the bottom of the window. Whoever managed to make the ball go to the other side will win.

Here comes an interesting problem: how can we control the block? We planned to use a distance sensor to help you control the block. We will set a area where you can put your hand in and the location of the block is decided by your position in the area. We think it will be an interesting game with interaction and it is more practical to use.

Idea 3 Barrier Breakthrough !

Idea 3 is also a game. To be honest, the inspiration comes from the second proposal. There will still be two players interacting with the distance sensors. However, the game is different. The goal of this game is to get the fruit in the end of the window. To achieve this, you have to get rid of the barriers on the way. The speed of the character in y-axis is going up, so it would be harder in the end of the game. We’ll make several levels of the game.

Bonus

The idea of a “touch pad”

We came up the idea of a touchpad using several distance sensors. By sensering different distance in the x and y axis, we can come up with the location of the hand. In this way, we built a “touchpad” that you don’t really need to touch. I haven’t got an idea how to use it yet, but it may show up in the final project!

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Final Project 3 Project Proposals

  •  äľ¬čŻ´ĺ•ĄďĽź
    • The title is in reference to 2 Chinese dialects 侬 for Shanghainese and ĺ•Ą for Hunan-ese. The translation is “What did you say?” which directly relates to the project because it’s teaching dialect basics.
    • I was thinking about doing my final project about learning Chinese dialects and having these native speakers of the dialect be able to have a visual for the learners. I want to do this project as well to raise awareness about the dying population of local dialect speakers. Fewer and fewer children are learning their local dialect because schools are only teaching Mandarin. Many parents are also not teaching or talking to their children in the local dialect because they want to make sure their children have the best chance in school with no issues of getting confused with words. The Chinese section of the gaokao also only tests on the standard Mandarin, so it further promoting the killing of the local dialects.
  • How blow can you go?
    • The title is a reference to a line in the Electric Shuffle “How low can you go” and reference how the game works.
    • For this project, users need to blow enough to get underneath the limbo pole. For this idea, I thought of the fad game Flappy bird. I remember it being hard for just tapping, so making it a little harder with the blowing makes it more fun hopefully. I am not exactly sure which kind of sensor I will use, I was thinking of using a pressure sensor, but I will still need to do some more research. 
  • Oscar the Grouch
    • This title is a reference to the Sesame Street character because he is a character in a trash bin and is grouchy (about incorrect sorting).
    • When thinking about this project, I immediately thought of my daily struggle with my residents not following Shanghai’s trash sorting, making me Oscar the Grouch. For this project, I would like to have the four bins on the screen with a grouchy monster hovering over. The user will be given a piece of trash that they have to put in the correct bin, otherwise, the monster will be very angry. To select which bin they want to place the trash, I want to use 4 big tv show game buzzers to represent each bin. I will create the display through processing and the controlling of the buttons through Arduino. This project’s goal is to make people more aware of the new trash sorting system. 
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Fusion and Palette – Final Project Proposal Draft

The second idea of my final project, I call it “fusion”. Since I entered this university, I’ve got to know lots of various people, with a number of those people I consider “interesting” even larger than the number I’ve met in the past 18 years. Those tracks, symbolizing how I met those people I treasure by socialization or just coincidence, therefore, seem to be of great value. And that’s why I’m considering to design such a project that exhibits the process of tiny footprints we stepped with other people (no matter they’re acquaintance or BFFs) along the way of our lives. This project aims at simulating the procedure of one person’s social life by one germ-liked light particle and the track it left behind, from someone’s born only with his/her parents by his/her side, to after his/her parents gradually step out of the main stage of his/her social life, and encounter various types of people, which would all be denoted by light particles and their tracks; of course, you can control the light particle’s movement and make it run into certain particles as you wish, just like you can adaptively choose which kind of friends to make. And there would be a rainbow point, standing for the person who’s meant to be standing by your side all the time, and you can possibly meet him/her from the very beginning of your life or maybe you ran into your end but never met the one. You can use a joystick to control the movement. The goal of this project is to reveal the fact that we’ve met a enormous number of people in our lives, and they may gonna join your life track for a little while or a long time and you may strengthen yourself or lose something precious because of this “fusion”. The challenge would be how to make vivid particle moving trail and the code of random particle generator.

And the third one, I call it “palette”. It’s like a color-paring game which you can play either with computer or with your friend. The basic structure would be a LED belt with six or eight LED lights in the game, which would each show a different color and is set with a corresponding button. Two players (maybe one player and computer) take turns to pick one color from the LED palette by pressing that button each time until all colors are picked. And the result of which side wins depends on such criterion: We can say that there exists a similarity value between each pair of colors. And for one player, we select two colors from all kinds of color he/she picked, of which the similarity value is the maximum (this process is done by the computer, and the most similar two colors’ LEDs would start to blink on the belt and the values of them would be shown on the screen by displaying those colors’ RGB values). And who owns a bigger maximum similarity value would win the game. The goal of this project is to let the gamers get fun and the main challenge is to design a decent way to exhibit all those factors together and make users understand the winning condition of this game clearly and rapidly.

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Project Proposal – Sarah Chung

1) Race to the finish

We will have two different characters which is made through processing, each player is given one button which generates a movement (when pressed they either move forward or backward) (the result of the button is randomly selected by Arduino) the first person to get to the finish line wins. The game will be shown through a screen using avatars generated through processing.This project is inspired by the popular game “Derby classic”  and gives it a modern twist. The hope for the project is to reinvent a classic game that invites people for collaboration and friendly competition. It hopes to bring forward popular and conventional ways of interaction with technology from the past so that there is a pathway to connect interaction from the past to interaction today.

2) Pattern

An image will appear on the screen and the player  must click the correct button that matches that image (square, triangle, circle). The further the player gets into the game the faster the images will appear and the shorter time they’ll have to press the correct key.  If they run out of time or press an incorrect symbol they’ll lose. The game will test speed and accuracy, my hope is that it will encourage players to do better and play multiple times as well as challenge their peers to beat their score. This is inspired by popular game, whack-a-mole.

3) Build a Tower

Using processing a vertical bar will appear on the screen moving left and right. Players will press a button to stop the movement of the bar, after this another bar will appear.The aim of the game is to stack bars directly on top of each other to make the tower as tall as possible.The further player’s reach into the game the faster the bars move horizontally. This game is aimed to test user’s hand eye coordination and hopefully encourages people to engage in friendly competition as they try to beat each other’s top score. This game is inspired by the common American arcade game, “Stack to the top”.

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PROJECT PROPOSAL-RODRIGO REYES

Title: Rola El Dado 

Statement of Purpose: Our previous midterm project consisted of having a person try his/her luck with our game of luck. We found that people thought they were very engaged with the interaction and that it was simply easier for them to understand the concept. We thought the concept of luck was very applicable to the final project. Although we want to make interactivity fairly simple so that the user may understand the project, we also want to make sure that we develop a project that is complex enough so that there are different elements to the “game” in order to avoid repetition. We found that people are drawn to interact with something that they understand, nevertheless something that does not lead to the same outcome over and over again. This way, the user of the project should be able to engage not just one time, but multiple times. This project hopes to encourage users to utilize it with others in social scenarios such as parties, family reunions, etc. In other words, it hopes to entertain groups in social settings. It draws its inspiration from the game “Truth and Dare”. The project will have six buttons, and six LED lights. The user will try to guess how many lights will turn on. There would be two different sounds, one for guessing right and one for wrong. This and the LED lights should allow the user to understand whether or not he got it right. If the user guesses how many lights turned on, he will get a randomized “truth” on the screen (setup through processing, and shown on the screen of the computer). If the user does not guess right he will get a randomized “dare” on the computer.  

The Storyline:

The Storyline draws its inspiration from stories like Netflix’s Bandersnatch. Considering that the game has multiple “routes” of playing, it should allow users to play the game more than once and still be engaged. There will be two players you can choose from on the screen; either a girl’s perspective or a guy’s perspective. To make it easier for the user to interact, we would film the real-life scenarios and export them to processing. Once you select your character, the user will follow the journey of whichever character he/she chooses. The player will select, with the mouse in the computer, whichever option he/ she chooses from the given ones on the screen. Depending on what one chooses, the storyline will develop differently. The Storylines will be centered around the topics of romantic relationships, and the lack of consent and respect in these. For each end, there will be something programmed on the Arduino to give a more realistic feel to the user. For instance, if the “guy” character chooses to be rude, he/she will end the storyline being slapped in real life (we would get a cardboard hand and servo motors to slap the user). Otherwise, if the “girl” character chooses to be very rude, he/she would be left alone. We would add a dramatic effect by having an electric fan connected to our Arduino throw air at the user. The game will be exaggerated and ironic, as it would only allow the user to choose options that are definitely not correct. Every path that can be taken should lead to the same outcome of being left alone. The project hopes to condemn the lack of respect in relationships and the lack of consent. It hopes that the user can interact with the processing storyline(s) and engaging. It also hopes to bring the virtual, what is going on in the screen, to the user (in real life through Arduino) so that he engages with the character even more.

The Better Reader:

The Better Reader will draw upon common exercises that are used to improve eyesight, as well as reading more quickly. The exercise has also been proven useful for people with dyslexia. A user will see on the computer (Processing will be used for the animation) three columns of three words each (nine words in total). One word is going to blink (disappear and appear) from the top left one by one and row by row until it reaches the last word and it goes back to the top to start again. This will allow for the user to direct his attention to that word that is blinking, facilitating the interaction. The program will randomly stop at any given word and it will ask the user to identify the last word that disappeared and appeared. It will give for options (four words), and if you select the correct word, the program will accelerate the word blinking pattern to make it harder for the user to follow along. You have three lives (opportunities to lose and keep playing) To make it more engaging we will use Arduino to connect to a console that has four buttons (each one to represent the four-word options that will be given on the computer). Furthermore, we would like to have a scoreboard with the ranking of the people that have “played” this game in hopes of incentivizing friendly competition. This exercise should be useful as it would allow users to develop their peripheral view, their concentration, and their short term memory.