TOGI strikes again…

Click on the buttons or use arrow keys.

Click HERE to play in full screen.

Right-click HERE for the source Flash file.

Still need to add some sounds and movement…

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.

Homework for week 5 in Computational Forms… drawing, translating and rotating.
Click HERE for the complete assignment.

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.

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.

Ha! Got it to work with real data… cheap way out though… ran my Java code and made it spit out the data to a file… then copied the data from the file into C so that I had a “hard coded” array in the source code – no need to figure out how to read a file and parse bytes in C 🙂
Here is the visualization with the real data:

Not very enlightening but if you stretch your imagination you can see when I am more active (riding bike and going up and down stairs). Next step, if I have time, is to sync the data points with the actual time of the readings – just have to figure out what the sample rate of the accelerometer is 🙂

For “Computers for the Rest of You” we have to plot data we recorded from a wearable device and plot it in an interesting way.
I wore an accelerometer that connected to a J2ME application on a phone via Bluetooth… the data was then sent to the computer via Bluetooth again using a Java app to read the serial port. Another Java program then processes the data to convert the bytes into floats.
I then wrote a program to draw a wobbling sphere in C/OpenGL.
Now I just have to port the Java program into C/OpenGL so that I can read the data in the later and display the sphere moving according to real data.
This video shows the movement of the sphere using the keyboard to change its parameters… Not quite what I want but it will do for now.

What I really wanted was to write a program that simulates a sphere with surface tension in zero gravity just like this one:

We did this quick code in Computational Forms today…

One more Computational Forms homework… this one was tricky even though the results look stunningly simple…
Click HERE to the homework.
Bezier curves are quite interesting – check this link out.
This is the video for one of the problems:

For next week I intend to develop the following game in Flash for the kids at Seton.

Introduction

The Tamagotchi game consists of some sort of a virtual pet that requires the user to interact with it in order to keep it happy, entertained or sometimes alive. The user can feed it, pet it, play with it and do anything else the pet allows it to do.

The idea for an Inclusive Tamagotchi pet is that with a simple switch, the users can interact with the virtual pet in a simple and effective manner. The game would be simplified so that the pet never dies and that a single interaction with it produces great and very visible results.

The game will allow the OT to create separate Tamagotchis for each kid so that each kid has their own pet and that the interaction with the pet is a cumulative experience and does not have to be rest each time the game starts. The kids will be able to customize the Tamagotchi’s color and even look and feel.

Objectives

For the kids at Seton, I believe such a game could achieve the following objectives:
• Create a connection between a physical object and the on-screen pet
• Demonstrate causality of action/reaction
• Give the kids something they will feel that they own and that grows with them
• Stimulate the curiosity for computer games
• Have fun!

Proposal

The game will be built using Flash and will use a keyboard emulator to enable the connection of any switch to control the game.
A settings menu will be presented at the start with the list of existing Tamagotchi pets created and the option to create a new one.
Within a Tamagotchi, you can customize its character (3 different pets available) and the general color scheme of the pet and the environment in which he lives in.
The Tamagotchi will always be moving on the screen attempting to grab the user’s attention.
The interactions with the Tamagotchi will be limited to eating, playing, and resting. An on screen button for each option will be presented using the scanning method for selection. Alternatively, the user could be presented with three switches – each representing one of the actions.
Points will be awarded for every interaction the user has with the Tamagotchi. The “age” of the Tamagotchi will also be maintained so that the users can compare which Tamagotchi has been played with for the longest time.