October 13, 2005
Etch a Sketch (analog -> serial -> computer)
The assignment for this week was to replace the mouse.
Using two potentiometers to control X and Y movement, and a switch to act as the mouse's button, I was able to create my own mouse replacement. I connected it to Processing and was able to make a digital etch-a-sketch.
The picture below shows the controller. I just glued the X pot and the Y pot to a piece of wood to anchor them (otherwise you need to use two hands to control each pot: one to hold it steady, the other to twist the knob).
I made sure to connect the positive and ground terminals of the pot in the same order for each so that they would both increase resistance in the same direction. If I had wired them the other way, twisting left would decrease resistance on one pot but increase it on the other. If I had made this mistake I could have fixed it in the computer (changed one of the variables to be = MAXVALUE - value, for instance), but it's easier this way.
The switch is just a piece of cardboard with a wire in it that you press onto another bare wire that is wrapped around the wood. I had the etch-a-sketch in mind when I built this controller, and so the switch has a bit of a gummy feeling. I remember when I used to play with etch-a-sketches that erasing the image was always a little difficult. You had to shake it a lot, and sometimes your "etching" would only have faded instead of disappeared. So by making the switch a little clunky I kind of replicated the same clunky erase feeling.
I also attempted to replicate the unstable erasure via software. In my Processing applet, I made it so that the erase button only dims the onscreen etching. One needs to press it several times to get the image to disappear completely. See screenshot below:
Code
PicBasic ProProcessing (Java) Code
Posted October 13, 2005 03:37 PM. Categories: Week 5 | Permalink
October 10, 2005
The Bandwidth of Consciousness
How much information do you think you can process into your consciousness every second? If I were asked the same question, I'd start to think about the fullness of sound (vs. the bit-rate of mp3s), the rich visual landscape I constantly survey (vs. the bit-rate of avi's), and so on, and I would have thought it was multiple megabytes, if not gigabytes, per second.
Yet, according to this reading, our capacity for processing information is only about 10-50 bits per second. That seems unbelievably low to me, considering all the sensory information we have access to. So how could it be true?
Well, the central idea is that we only really focus on one thing at a time, but our brains are so good at switching from thought to thought and input to input that we are able to scan through many different senses at once.
Another way we can get around this is that a lot of information gets processed subconsciously. Once we are so good at a certain task that it becomes automatic, like driving, we are able to subsume a great deal of sensory information subconsciously and not really process it, which frees the mind up for other tasks.
I know my own mind has a sort of "buffer" of information that it holds. When I am engrossed in a basketball game on TV, I have found myself literally unable to hear comments spoken to me. Not that tuning people out is anything extraordinary. The interesting thing about that is, as soon as the play is over (anywhere from a 2 or 3 to more than 10 seconds later), I then become conscious of the fact that someone did say something to me, but I truly had no recollection of actually hearing them speak. I need to ask the person to repeat their comment. I think it's amazing that I can know that someone said something to me but have 0 recollection of the actual act of them speaking to me.
Posted October 10, 2005 12:41 PM. Categories: Readings , Week 5 | Permalink