Pcomp Midterm

Once upon a time, Ilan, Eric, Peng, and Rosie had to do a pcomp midterm project...and they all lived happily ever after. (We hope). Here's all the stuff that should replace the ellipses. For more rough notes, check out our wiki page.

Part One: Ideas

Social Distance Hat
The first idea: a hat that provided information to people about the wearer's personal space, specifically, where others were located in regard to the wearer's personal space. We talked about different "types" of personal space - casual social space, intimate space, etc. One of our goals would be that this would be customizable, so it could be adjusted for cultural differences in defining personal space. Below are Ilan's rough notes and observations:

We talk a lot about differences between different cultures in order to create a tool that enables new social interaction between people from different countries.

Ilan had an assumption: - If you are not fluent with a language you will find it hard to express the degree of your feelings in different words. Most of these people will just know one word that expresses the feeling. For example, some different degrees of the same things: "I like" vs. "I love": "excuse me" vs. "so sorry" "ugly" vs. "disgusting" An application could be to put a pressure sensor that after you say the word you will use to indicate the degree of your feeling regarding this word. For example, say "ugly" and press hard. Many lights will blink to indicate that you meant very ugly (disgusting).

We kept on exploring the differences between cultures. Here are some interesting things we found out. Language: We asked people to make the ANIMAL sounds emitted by children in their country: - Dog: have have(Israel), woof woof/bow bow/ruff ruff (us) , wan wan(japan), wang wang(china), mung mung(korean), au au(brazil), woow woow(hongkong). - Pig: hru hru(russian), oink oink(us),ggul ggul (korea). - Hen: co co co(russian, brazil), pak pak(isreal), gu gu (korea, taiwan), no sound (hongkong). (read more on wiki page ...)

We asked people to make the ACTION sounds emitted by children in their country:
- Door bell: ding (taiwan), ding dong (all other).
- Knock on door: dang dang (china), nak nak (us), tuk tuk (israel), toc toc (brazil), gok gok (hongkong), co co (taiwan).
- Car horn: tutut (belgia), bibi (russia and brazil), baba (taiwan), bipbip (all other).

Body language: - Important issue in body language is distance. The distance is divided in to several parts like: public, social, private and intimate. The distance is mainly decided by the density of people that you're used to. For example, what is regarded by a Chinese person as social distance will probably be an intimate distance for an Australian. An application could be to put a distance sensor on your head that will let the other person in front of you know in which area he's standing regarding specifically your self.
- Body gestures are not part of body language but we use them to "talk" without talking (not unconsciously). We asked people to show the hand gestures for some words: - No: one finger moving right left (israel and taiwan) , all palm moving left right(all other). - Wait: only Israel (actually it's like 7 in chines). - Count numbers: different in Korea, Israel, China. - Quote: only in the US. - Money: like OK (Korea, taiwan), rubbing thumb with fingers (all others).

A "Play with Time" Machine
We decided to abandon the hat idea in favor of a sort of clock that would let users play with time. Here, in Peng's words, is the idea in a nutshell (more rough notes are available on our wiki page):

The concept of this idea is to let people in touch, vision and hearing feel the invisible soft time. So far basically we want to build a transparent round container(maybe of glass), in which is water, in the water there are clock hands, outside and at the bottom of the container is a potentionmeter connected to the clock hands and on the other hand the Arduino, the Arduino is connected to the computer to control a piece of video. People will put their hands into the water to move the clock hands, therefore to control the video going back 10 mins or going forward 1 hour, for example.

Water Harp Music Controller
We also abandoned the "play with time" machine but liked the idea of using water in our project. Thus, our final idea of a sort of interface to control music using water was born. We decided to make "strings" out of water that would allow a user to change aspects of music (tempo, pitch, etc.) by disrupting the water with his or her hand.

Part Two: Building and Problem Solving

To make this work, we needed to make water part of our circuit, so when water was flowing, the circuit would be complete. When a person stuck a finger or hand in the way of the water, the circuit would be open, and a change in the music would occur. So we set out to build a circuit that was completed by a stream of water. I bought a garden hose and some mesh wire while Ilan and Eric rigged up a system using two empty water jugs that would have water flow out of a hole in the hose into the mesh wire, thus completing the circuit and lighting up the led. We soon discovered a problem: regular water was not conductive enough to complete our circuit reliably. Solution: we added salt. Lots and lots of salt. But still, we had problems with conductivity. Frustration!

In class last week, we got feedback and other suggestions for ways to interrupt the water. We liked the idea of having a photocell sense light from an led that would be interrupted by water. This way we could still use water but avoid the problem of having the water complete the circuit. We also decided to scale back the goals of the project to simply have the streams of water play individual tones in the Arduino software instead of controlling music in Max.

So we began to build again. We put an led in a hole in a block of wood near a photocell, which was also inserted in the wood to face the led. Then we drilled a hole perpendicular to those all the way through the wood for the water. The photocell was spitting out readings of around 960 when uninterrupted by water. So we add water and are ready for it to obscure the light. No such luck. The water didn't really affect the amount of light the photocell sensed. We tried making the hole bigger to allow for more water, but this didn't help. I perused the junk shelf in the shop searching for ideas and saw....sprinkles! Halloween sprinkles, to be exact. So I had the idea to color the water by dissolving sprinkles in it. Finally - success! The dark water interrupted the light much better than clear water. We then tried coffee instead of water, which did a wonderful job.

The next improvement was that Ilan got a water pump so we could continuously recycle the same water instead of having to manually pour water into the top dispenser. Then I found the perfect liquid that would let us avoid sprinkles - chocolate syrup! So in our final prototype, we use water with chocolate syrup added to it to darken the water.

As of Friday, Ilan and Eric had our first working prototype. It's a single stream of water that, when interrupted, plays a single tone. To do this, we used the Melody code Tom sent out on the pcomp listserve. We have a single speaker that plays a tone according to the melody code in the Arduino software. This weekend and early this week, we attempted to build a 4-stream model, but without success. So our final (current) prototype remains the single stream model. Peng built us a larger version with room for four streams of water, but we were unable to fix all the problems with this new model before the due date.