Author Archives: lucaslongo

iHold – one hand iPhone usage

The iPhone’s slick metallic back is great but it always seems like it’s going to slip off my hand if I am trying to use it with one hand only.
So I created iHold! It allows you to use your iPhone with one hand without the fear of dropping it!
You can also do it to use 2 fingers – AND you can still use the belt clip.
Compatible with most iPhone covers with belt clips 🙂

TOGI animation

So TOGI keeps going – figured I’d use it for the “From Physical to Virtual and Back” class as well. Modeled TOGI and animated it in Maya using polygonal transformations.

Here’s a quick movie:

Eye Tracking

For “Computers for the Rest of You” we have to come up with a project that reads “data” from our body (heart rate, brain waves, sweat, eye movement…) and investigate what it can tell us about ourselves.

I decided to keep on developing my eye tracking idea:

Hypothesis
When people are tasked to pick their favorite photograph from several photos, it is not always the one they spent the most time looking at.

Method
Several subjects will be asked to pick their favorite photo. They will then be presented with three equally sized photos in a Processing window. Eye tracking will record their eye motions while the pick their favorite photo and record it by clicking. The eye tracking data will be compared with the favorite picks to see if there is a correlation between time spent looking at a photo and the favorite picked.

TOGI – another version!

MUCH BETTER NOW… ufff…

Press the SPACE bar to go through instructions…
Make TOGI eat by pressing the RIGHT Arrow Key.
Make TOGI sleep by pressing on the LEFT arrow key.
DOWN arrow keys starts all over.

Click HERE to play in full screen.

Right-click HERE for the source Flash file.

TOGI !!

This week we will present our game prototypes to Annete from Seton.
I created TOGI – a little robot I sometimes scribble on a piece of paper.
As I posted earlier, the idea was to create a Tamagotchi like “game” where you had to feed or play with the character.
I started trying to animate every single part of TOGI in Flash and just ran into complications when creating the movie clips one inside of the other and creating motion tweens. It turns out that the order in which you create the movie clips matters… you have to create all the pieces of the character, animate each one, then join the into groups… to be able to finally animate the whole character with all parts moving together.
UFFF… then as Amit suggested, I put the animation aside and concentrated on the game play… went out for a bit, cleared my head and and finally got to something decent.
And here is the version I am going to present – still have to add sound.
Click inside the game to start playing.
Use the right and left arrow keys to make TOGI move 🙂


Click HERE to play in full screen.
Right-click HERE for the source Flash file.

This is the “first” version…
Click inside the game to start playing.
Use the right and left arrow keys to make TOGI move.

Click HERE to play in full screen.
Right-click HERE for the source Flash file.

Computers for the Rest of You – Capturing Your Experience

IDEA:

My illusion is that I am pretty restless even when I am sitting down – I shake me leg constantly and I can never sit still.

PROJECT COMPONENTS:

  1. Accelerometer transmitting its data via Bluetooth in my pant’s pocket.
  2. Cell phone running a J2ME applet reading serial data coming in through Bluetooth. Click HERE for the applet. Instructions are HERE – by Dan O’Sullivan.
  3. Same applet creates a log in the cell phone.
  4. Once logging is complete, the same applet transmits the log via Bluetooth.
  5. Java applet on computer that reads serial data and stores it into a file. Click HERE for the applet. Instructions are HERE – by Dan O’Sullivan.
  6. Another Java applet on computer that reads and parses the data and saves the values into txt files. Click HERE for the code – you will have to change the file paths for your computer.
  7. C/OpenGL program that draws data in the form of a bubble with the data as input. Click HERE for the code.

I am using the x, y, and z components of the accelerometer to determine the phase shift of the spheres.
I logged my movements during a period of 6 hours.

DATA VISUALIZATION:

The sphere is drawn on a 3D plane and an increasing yellow line on the top shows which portion of the 6 hours of data that you are looking at. Here is the video:

You are seeing the following:

  1. At home getting ready to leave
  2. Going down 5 flights of stairs
  3. On bike going to school
  4. Going up 4 flights of stairs to ITP
  5. Sitting in class
  6. Going down 4 flights of stairs for coffee
  7. Going up 4 flights of stairs back to class
  8. Sitting in class
  9. Going down 4 flights of stairs to leave
  10. On bike going home
  11. Up 5 flights of stairs
  12. END

CONCLUSION:

Even though the data visualization cannot be associated easily with specific movements
you can actually tell that even when I am in class sitting down (mid portion of the data) the sphere keeps wobbling. There are very few periods of stability or no movement confirming my initial thought that I am always moving around and restless.
I also noticed that I am the happiest when I am on the move – well – on my bike more specifically.