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Glorious Success II

It's alive! We managed to hook the pieces together and it works! It is amazingly responsive and it's totally obvious that this can be a great interactive experience.

Now that we have the framework ready, the really fun and rewarding work starts. Creating an interactive piece that is magical, seductive, engaging and inspiring is our goal.

Work in progress

on Vimeo.

Øyvind is hard at work, welding the harp together. We are moving forwards.

Experience prototype tested!

I was doubting how far we would get today. But starting at 1330 or something like that, after the visit to Nobel peace center we made in 1,5 hours an experience prototype that gave a good insight into our project. That is really good progress. Plucking the strings (on our mock up 1:1 harp) gave a surprisingly good feel when viewing a manual processing sketch displaying in front of you.



Everyone should try it, because you automatically get ideas on how the visual response could be. What would plucking the harp soft/hard, fast/slow, one/chords look like, hear like, feel like?

And, please sketch ideas for the physical part of the harp over the weekend! We need to start to build that on Monday/Tuesday. The current prototype is 200 cm high and 80-120 cm wide. The image input is a bit diffuse right now, so pitching ideas for the general approach to this part is welcomed.


Jørn playing the harp in his head.

Some inspiring links...

Interview with Karsten Schmidt (aka Toxi) and Matt Wade of London interaction design studio Moving Brands, talking about Processing in the context of some of their projects.

Keepon Dancing

I'm not suggesting we start dabbling with robot technology for our exhibition, but since the little Keepon robot sparked such an interest yesterday, I thought I'd just archive some info about it here.

One of the questions raised was: "How on earth does this thing work? Does it actually sense its surroundings, or is it just a glorified 90's Dancing Coke Can?"

The Infanoid Project says:

Keepon has a yellow snowman-like body. The upper part (the "head") has two eyes, each of which is a color CCD camera with a wide-angle lens (120 degrees horizontally), and a nose, which is actually a microphone. The lower part (the "belly") has a small gimbal and four wires, by which the body is manipulated like a marionette; four motors and two circuit boards (a PID controller and a motor driver) are installed in the black cylinder. Since the body is made of silicone rubber and its inside is relatively hollow, Keepon's head and belly deform whenever it changes posture and when someone touches it. (more + pics)

Neat touch to actually place the cameras in its eyes and letting it "smell" sound! Still, the most important thing may be observing just how alive this thing seems, despite looking like a pair of tennis balls. One can communicate emotion with very simple means. (Eureka!)

And here's a cute, little music video for those of you who missed it.