Malcolm Lambrecht, IGME 470 Blog

Feelings of history is our interactive history experience. Here are links to the PDF and PPTX versions of our presentation. https://drive.google.com/open?id=19IjNT0PVCze2-3mP0LlIUWTbBMsmDICl https://drive.google.com/open?id=1PEe-G5sSvwXu1Lx9hSW0IHDq2DQlgjmI

Ambiguity as a Resource for Design This article is talking about the benefits of ambiguity in your design and how it can lead to more thought or unexpected results. Ambiguity is often the first thing we try to stamp out of any interface, the user should know exactly how to use it and what to do with minimal confusion. If an interface is ambiguous it is hard to use and bad. However in art ambiguity is often what provides the creative depth that makes it so engaging, my grandmother was an artist and she would often talk about how if you were just painting objects you were making art but you were not creating Art. Without ambiguity the piece turns into more of a display as opposed to a piece of art that draws the viewer in. I think adding ambiguity to some things like the slogan bench is an interesting way of transforming very basic things into a more artistic expression is more effective as opposed to just putting up signs because it causes the user to actually think about the piece a...

     My vision for the second project was to come up with a way for people to share experiences through non visual mediums. I ended up choosing sound for the medium because it seemed the most practical and varied way to convey what I wanted. So much of what we share today is visually based even if it does incorporate sound into it, like videos of concerts or vlogs for instance. My goal was to simply take the inputs from person A and convey that data through sound to person B. The device would be wearable and measure a variety of environmental factors (wind, temperature, sun, rain, humidity) but also measure biological factors (heartrate, recent movement, body temp, brain waves) in order to convey how the user was feeling as well as what the environment was like, with the output sound taking the form of a procedurally generated song. This could serve a variety of purposes: an installation with two closed booths that contain environmental controls, a platform to share exper...

Part 1 The first part of the exercise was fairly easy to complete as I've been using the serial window as a console for debugging sensor values for the past several exercises. I set up the button example with a photo sensor and logged both values to the console. Part 2 Part 2 was a little more difficult for me and I used several tutorials to help me understand the communication aspects of it.  (1)   (2)   (3)  The sketch I ended up creating works by having three buttons in processing that are red/on when the mouse is over them and black/off when the mouse is not. Each button corresponds to an LED on the breadboard. This section involved a lot of repeated code for me so next time I am going to try and create a reuseable button or element to make it faster and easier to iterate on. Part 3 Part 3 was a solid extension of the concepts from part 2. I used 2 potentiometers and a light sensor to control this sketch which then sent the instructions back to the...

My post will be a little light on fritzing pictures because somethings wrong with my installation. As a summary I attached a joystick (2 analog inputs) to control the brightness of two LEDs separately. The two LEDs are above a light sensor (1 more analog input) that detects the changes in brightness and uses that to turn either a red or a green LED on. For the digital inputs I used two buttons to control which one of a 4x4 grid of LEDs was on. Getting the analog circuit to work was mostly an exercise in sensor calibrating and value mapping. To get the Joystick to output a value from 0-255 instead of ~500 to 1023 in one direction and  0 to ~500 in the other took some creative math. I ended up taking the value of the joystick in the setup method and subtracting that then taking the absolute value and now the joystick increases the brightness no matter which direction you use it on. Getting the light sensor to detect the change from 2 LEDs was more of a pain. I had to take the value...

     For the first part I spent some time getting set up with Fritzing and the Arduino IDE then got setup with the basic button example that was provided. The example worked great out of the box so it was pretty easy to modify it to use different inputs and outputs by changing the variables and the ports the wires were plugged into. I chose 4 as the button input and 12 as the new output and I also moved the LED to the breadboard with a resistor.      The second part was more of a programming challenge I wanted to try for double click toggling the state of the LED and a long hold turning it on for as long as the button was held after the button was released. I used the same circuit layout as part on for this section.      The double click was the harder one but I ended up with a click counter and a click delay variable. Each time the buttons state changed it compared the time the last state change was with the current time to decide if it ...

     This part was fairly simple all I had to do was plug in the Arduino, install the IDE, and download the repository. The only change I had to make to the code was to change the spelling of the offTime variable to match throughout the program.      The program works by setting pin 13 to OUTPUT mode then changing the output between on (HIGH) and off (LOW). The delay function is used to add spacing between the outputs.      To change the rate the LED was blinking I changed the onTime and offTime variables which are just the amount of time the delay function should wait, measured in milliseconds.       For the third part I used the bread board since I would need two output pins and both would ned the GND pin. To add the second pin I added a second pin number variable and made sure to set it up in OUTPUT mode in the setup function. Getting them to alternate being off and on was just an extra two lines to control the second ...