© 2008 Julian. All rights reserved.
A curious touch keyboard interface that was a bit confusing. This was found at a Department of Motor Vehicles location here in California this morning. The keyboard was there in this kiosk so I could type in my car’s license … Continue reading
© 2008 Julian. All rights reserved.
© 2008 Julian. All rights reserved.
I got an instructive challenge to one of the hand-held forms I’ve been modeling. It’s a bit hard to see in white plastic, but the form is basically smaller, with some simple articulations that in my early days here, have … Continue reading
© 2008 Julian. All rights reserved.
This is a quick, quick sketch for an idea I had for a intimate personable device that is best described as a digital worry bead or Kombolói — not so much a worry bead as something to capture and diffuse … Continue reading
© 2007 Julian. All rights reserved.
Product Prototype: SlowMessenger Slow Messenger is an instant messaging device that delivers messages exceptionally slowly. Built into the device is a messaging technology that unfolds its content based on an interface that borrows from the traditions of long-form letter writing, … Continue reading
© 2007 Julian. All rights reserved.
Finally, something to show for this “Slow Messenger” project, a playful interface for instant messaging. I’ve gotten all the hardware bits cobbled together and most of the firmware. Now I’m working on learning how to tie in AOL Instant Messenger so that messages can be delivered to the device. Fortunately (I think) AOL has opened their API somewhat. You get some sort of key and then can create your own IM applications based on their protocol and network. I don’t know how well this works, but I suspect if it works well-enough, a preposterous projects like this should be able to make good use of it.
I found one little unexpected design glitch — the LED driver (MAX6953) and the EEPROM I’m using (AT24C1024) have the exact same ‘default’ I2C address (0×50). I stumbled across this while trying to debug why the EEPROM didn’t seem to work, even after an electrical test and crap. You can typically hard-wire the chip to take on one of another possible addresses. On the AT241024 you just wire the A1 pin to either GND or VCC and set the A1 bit of the device address either low or high. The MAX6953 has a similar deal, only a larger matrix of possible different addresses, probably because the chip will typically be found in systems with lots of MAX6953s ganged together to drive large LED displays. In my case, it’ll be easier to make some small hardware changes to the Slow Messenger display board than it’ll be to change the AT241024, which is on a generic Flavonoid board that I want to keep as identical as possible to the other one’s to make managing the firmware easier.
Strange, but I thought that I got closer to having the real-deal I’d understand more about why I’ve committed so much time to doing it. But, I’m no where near understanding why I’m doing it or what it means. This may be beyond the near future and somewhere from another planet.
I heard someone confuse the Near Future Laboratory with corporate R&D. Like, essentially assuming that what I was doing was stuff just around the bend that someone at some corporate lab or product design operation is probably better suited to develop. Whatev. The Near Future Laboratory is the other near future — the one no one in a corporate lab would really think about because the demands of commerce minimize risk, don’t even scratch their heads if the perceived market is too small, and only think about what can be realized to help make next year’s earnings look good. Just to clarify.
Technorati Tags: Near Future Laboratory, slowest instant messenger
© 2007 Julian. All rights reserved.
Here’s the v03 Flavonoid prototype pretty much all assembled, except for attaching a battery on back and the DS1340 real-time clock and its crystal — you can see the landing pad there near the center.. I’d be surprised if this all works. I mean..something must be wrong, right?
Okay, everythings on there..now what? I basically try to test each component one at a time to see if it works. Here I’m checking the QT113H, which is a touch/proximity sensor. The sensor can detect whether the Flavonoid is being held, or is near your body. Touch/proximity interface semantics are something I’m interested in experimenting with — more than just physical contact, but nearness as well.
What I’m doing is checking to see if the sensoris working. My finger is over a contact to which will be attached a flexible probe, like a super thin wire that can be run along the inside of whatever enclosure this ends up in. So, it triggered — I can tell because my multimeter went to about 3.3v.
But, then something annoying happened..it basically locked up, the sensor. And then I remembered that when I was first experimenting with the QT113H, it had to be recalibrated, basically by cycling the power. I never really fully understood when that had to be done, but regardless — this is a problem because, well..Flavonoid has no power switch so I can’t cycle the power on the thing, even for debugging. Drat..
I threw a tri-color LED on there for debugging and diagnostics. I think I’ll probably put a surface-mount one on there in the next version.
I put an in-system programmer jack on the board so I could program it with just about any in-system programing jig. That ribbon cable there is running to my STK500 on my Windows machine, although one of these days I guess I’ll figure out how to use the rig I got for my Mac. Anyway, I use AVRStudio’s little AVR programming interface to flash the program memory from the STK500. I comple using the WinAVR (avr-gcc) tools, which works like a charm..no problems.
Okay, back to this snafu with the QT113H..basically it turns out that you can "power" the thing directly from an I/O pin on the microcontroller. It uses so little current to run, that one of the pins on the ATmega32 can supply it. So, that means I can connect the power pin of the QT113H directly to one of the port pins, which I did here with a little light gauge white wire wrap. I had to cut a trace on the board that had been the VCC supply for the QT113H. Easy peasy. Now i can power the thing up and down programmatically. So, every reset or whenever. Convenient.
Here I attached a little bit of white wire as the sensor probe for the QT113H. Works like a charm. If I hold my hand near it, it triggers the sensor.
That’s it — proximity sensor works. Did a little redesign in the original schematic.
Next, I’ll check to see if the real-timeclock is working.. Continue reading
© 2007 Julian. All rights reserved.
Trying to come up with some "log line" style idioms to describe the whole vector of near future research I’m doing around game gestures that elongate the scales of motion, time and contact (proximity, touch, etc.) that electronic games have completely shrunk down to nil. There’s definitely a trend towards considering stretching these out a bit — the Wii, Warioware, Teku Teku Angel, Nike+, MobZombies. How far can you go? Can there be "offline gaming" where the screen disappears to the point of it not even being necessary? Where you sort of ambiently know that you’re gaming in the sense that your actions and activities "offline" will register in the game world once you get back to your normal human computer later? Can you still be gaming while you’re doing a run to the market, without being consciously and actively "in" the game while doing the grocery shop? But still, knowing in the back of your mind that, hey, cool! I’ll get my shopping done and probably get a +2 power up!
What’s the language and name for something like that?
* Hands-Free Gaming
* Offline Gaming
* Off-Screen Gaming
Evolution In Game Gestures?
How far can you go with a game gesture? Can shopping at the Farmer’s Market become an interface to an offline game, such that my action and activity while shopping powers-up my electronic game avatar while I’m away from it? Is our imagination open to the idea of gaming..even while not in front of a screen? Can you keep it in the back of your head that "stuff" in the online game world will be affected by your activities in the offline world? How will that change our perception of activities offline? How will it affect our attention to what’s actually happening around us? What will it feel like to know you’re gaming even though you’re not twiddling keys on your mobile phone, nor looking at its little postage stamp screen? How about this — you’re not even networked! Everything is stored up and then uploaded to the mothership later, when you’re back home ready to be an online agent again. You get to participate in what’s going on in 1st life, all the while knowing in the back of your head that your actions get to become something valuable in 2nd life!
The last couple of months has been an investigation of what this could be, through a mix of mostly technology craftwork with the Flavonoid project. Some notes, scribblings and sketches, too, but mostly construction of a theory object that I hope will help me answer these questions perhaps more expediently than head-scratching alone. We’ll see how it goes. Flavonoid came to life yesterday, so that’s promising!
Technorati Tags: Near Future Laboratory, near-future, Offline Gaming, pervasive electronic games, play
© 2007 Julian. All rights reserved.
This is another Flavonoid variation. I fear there are now becoming more than is reasonable to manage. Each one reflects a different design sensibility and a learn-through-practice approach. I decided to use the I2C protocol for many of the devices, largely to address the challenge of routing too many signals and in a bid to make the software more manageable. But, I sometimes get ahead of myself. My eagerness to send designs off to be manufactured sometimes has me skip some important considerations. In the case of this design here, I thought I could substitute the clock chip with another, which has the exact same pin-outs, only uses I2C versus SPI. I even prototyped with it. But, it turns out that it’s a 5 volt device, with no real leeway. Most of the other chips prefer a low-voltage in the range of 2-3.6 volts. So, basically — this real-time clock, the DS1307, is incompatible.
Back to the drawing board to find a replacement. Fortunately, I found a suitable chip, the DS1340, which has the exact same pinouts, is compatible with I2C and is happy as a fed pig at the 3 or 3.3 volts with which I plan to power the board. I should be able to hot-air the DS1307 off and replace it with the DS1340. We’ll see how that goes.
On this design, I also went with a surface mount crystal for the clock and tried working with a dual-axis accelerometer, but now I’m pretty much definitely of the mind that a tri-axis unit is the way to go.
I’ve been working at salvaging the LIS3LV02DQ tri-axis thing that cost me $15 a pop by trying my hand at hot-air rework. Here I popped the unit off and applied some flux to the thing, and then a warm solder iron. Like magic, it cleaned up and what looked like the perfect amount of solder magically adhered to each and every pin, clean as you like. This is what I should’ve done to begin with. Lesson learned. I reapplied it to the board and it looks like it attached just right. Unfortunately, the landing pad was a bit messed up with missing pads, but those were no-connects, so I might be okay.
Why do I want a tri-axis accelerometer? Well, my intuition is sort of guiding me here. This Durable Affinity design project is not concerned with the typical sort of meanings of precision (split-second, spot-on-accurate measurements of acceleration, etc.) I am curious how ambient precision can be used as a part of the interaction syntax. For instance, what sorts of interaction designs may arise when we take account of ambient movement, or ambient time — how much movement over the last 30 minutes, or has an hour passed or a few hours, and so forth.
Why do I blog this? Trying to create implications for my own work and keep track of what’s going on (and why it’s going on) in the Near Future Laboratory! Continue reading
I made this.
Time, motion and touch or contact are three semantic elements that the Internets claim to diminish, but do so for our own good. For instance, for the good of allowing us to instantly communicate with friends, work colleagues or family. For the good of allowing us to work from home, or get something to someone else without having to physically move, or physically move material or ship a document. Or for the good of mitigating against the necessity of face-to-face contact.
There must be a balance between instant (messaging, downloads) and slow (mail, reflection) time scales. Or between largely sedentary digital activities (heads-down, screen-lock, sofa gaming) and embodied kinesthetic activities, like the things we do to “get away” from the screen — walk, sport, stretch. Or between mediated contact and physical touch?
It might be interesting to consider time, motion and touch as idioms whose characteristics should not be mitigated against, at least for the purpose of reflecting upon what digital life would be like if we operated in a middle ground between eliminating time delays, for instance, and having some playful or meaningful interaction with time above the sub-minute scale. (For instance, electronic games in which playing longer gains points.)
What would a world be like if things weren’t quite “instant”, but used elongated time as an interaction element? How could our own physical motion create a mechanical interface between the physical and digital worlds — beyond mouse movements or finger twitches and closer to Wii-gestures? What are the ways in which time, motion and touch be used to create a meaningful bridge between 1st life (physical) and 2nd life (digital)?
I started designing and building these sensors devices to simultaneously accumulate time, motion and touch to experiment with ways in which these idioms might be used to express some sort of online, digital, 2nd life activity.
I’ve called them “Flavonoid”, mostly because I liked the way the word sounds and its fun to hear people say it in a questioning way. They’re designed to be small, something that you carry with you all the time, like a cell phone or such. The firmware being created stretches out the dimensions of time, motion and touch so they deliberately “slow” down any accumulation of data — they won’t be “expressive” (have effects) for quickly-done activity. Time is not quick, but ponderous, relatively speaking, so that hour have meaning, but seconds can’t be measured. They’re positively glacial objects in the era of instant messaging, digital switches and network data caches.
And these three semantic idioms — time, motion, touch — work together, not separately. More expressive outputs come from these three idioms when they are integrated together. Time alone (without touch or movement) means something different than time with the object near one’s body. Motion for a brief time, alone, means barely anything, whereas sustained motion while holding the object or having it in one’s pack, has richer semantics.
The interaction semantics I’m angling at is this idea of creating an application syntax based on establishing a sense of Durable Affinity between a person, a lively designed object, and the expression in a digital, online form that these two can create through time, motion and touch based activity.
At the next level of design, they won’t look like they need a Homeland Security clearance certificate.
Why do I blog this?
To start figuring out why I’m spending so much time building these sensor amalgams devices.
Just A Few Related Things
Ross O’Shea’s G-Link
SLOWMail
Nintendo Wii
Teku Teku Angel
Piedimonsterz
Control Freaks
Flavonoid, 1st Prototype (submitted for consideration in C5 Corporation’s “Quest for Success” competition at ISEA 2006, San Jose.)
My Own Notes
Flavonoid Research Wiki Page (1st, 2nd, 3rd prototypes)
An API For Durable Affinity
Notes on Motion Sensing
Pocket Sakura
Notes on Pedometry
“Viewmaster” of the Future
Vis-a-Vis Games
Flavonoid Related
Technorati Tags: blogjects, computer-human interaction, pervasive electronic games, sensors
© 2007 Julian. All rights reserved.
Title
An API for Durable Affinity: Engineering Interfaces That Matter
Short Title
Why I’ve been engineering time, motion and touch sensors
Summary
In the era of an “Internet of Things” design for interfaces between humans and devices becomes increasingly important. The pervasive reach of the digitally networked world means it is likely that “things” — computational objects — will play an increasingly consequential role in the establishing, maintaining and knitting together networked social formations. It is even conceivable to imagine that these sorts of things may themselves become lively, engaged social actors. How do we want to interface with these networked objects, and what sort of interface semantics would move computer-human interaction design out of the often awkward, frustrating Proterozoic era we currently inhabit, into a more habitable, lively, human-scaled era for computer-human interfaces?
Abstract
This paper is an explication of a theory object constructed to develop a computer-human interface syntax called “durable affinity”. Durable affinity describes a kind of semantic interface between a computational device and a human that effects control over the device, but through less typical, instrumental mechanisms. Durable affinity interface elements consist of real-time, embodied motion and touch. These elements are elongated in degree. Time scales are in the range of minutes to days, while embodied motion is measured in degrees of sustained activities and touch moves into the degree of holding rather than momentary contact. By using “human-scaled” interaction elements — real-time, embodied motion, and touch — durable affinity interfaces are an attempt to establish a niche of ambient, paced, calm computational environments.
In this experiment, three primary application programming interfaces (APIs) are developed for the purposes of investigating the creation of “durable affinity” — meaningful device-human interfaces that have more aesthetic semantics than typical instrumental device-human interfaces. These three APIs are real-time, motion and touch. The theory object is composed of a small, portable computational device designed and built by the author. The device contains interface technology for these three APIs. In effect, the device is a platform for experiments in durable affinity interfaces. By connecting the device to, for instance, a small microcomputer, the elements of time, motion and touch can be accessed as interface components. Essentially, the platform becomes analagous to a typical interface platform such as a computer mouse, only rather than using horizontal motion and button clicks, the platform uses time, three-dimensional movement, and touch as components of the interface syntax.
To further the semantics of durable affinity, these three APIs are elongated beyond what many computer human interfaces consider rational, or useful. In the durable affinity context, real-time is measured in days rather than milliseconds; motion is measured in sustained, body-based activity such as a long walk or hours at sport rather than the twitch of one’s wrist; touch is measured in the degree one would find with holding hands, rather than momentary contact found in typical instrumental computer interfaces.
For the purposes of this experiment, the device platform described above is used to create an email message receiving device to help explicate aspects of the durable affinity concept. Contained within the device is an email message sent from a significant other to the device’s human. The message very slowly reveals itself over a period of days if the device’s human creates an affinity relation with the object. In order to unlock and reveal the message, presumably a message with some semantic weight, the device’s human must hold it for periods of time as if it were a treasured gift, and bring it along while engaged in routine activities like going to work or shopping for groceries.
By deliberately creating such an enduring, sympathetic interface between a computer and human, this investigation finds ways to wrap a richer set of human-scaled semantics — beyond pure instrumentalities — around computational devices.
Motivation
The goal of this project is to investigate ways of establishing a positive historical relationship with objects by inscribing them with a level of meaning attuned to the register of human emotional sensibilities. There are a range of motivations for such a goal. Such motivations include: establishing lasting associations with things so as to avoid a culture of disposability; finding areas in which an increasingly crowded, fast-paced information space can have corners of calm, slow, ambient experiences; establishing niche areas of aesthetically and emotionally rich digital networked interactions.
References
Chapman, J. 2005. “Emotionally Durable Design: Objects, Experiences and Empathy”, Earthscan.
Deschamps-Sonsino, Alexandra. Position Paper presented at NordiCHI 2006 workshop “Near-Field Interaction and the Internet of Things”, Oslo, Norway. URL (accessed December 2006): http://www.designswarm.com/NordiCHI_asonsino.pdf
Weiser, M. and Brown, J. S. 1997. The coming age of calm technolgy. In Beyond Calculation: the Next Fifty Years, P. J. Denning and R. M. Metcalfe, Eds. Copernicus, New York, NY, 75-85.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.<!–
© 2007 Julian. All rights reserved.
So, I’m at the point with the Flavonoid project that I need to start getting printe circuit boards made. (The printed circuit board includes an accelerometer, a real-time clock, touch sensor, and a bit of EEPROM memory, if you want to know.) A fair bit of the break was spent schooling up on Eagle, doing layouts, making mistakes and that sort of thing. (It’s remarkably full-featured for a free product and, despite a few quirks, does what it says it will do. Plenty of activity in the forums and help is quick to come when I’ve gotten in trouble.)As I closed in on a design I thought was close enough to gold to send off, I started poking around various forums to find out what operation might be suitable for small (1-10 piece) runs.