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September 28, 2006

Inspirations

Posted by min at 02:20 AM

September 25, 2006

Ubiach at the Ubicomp, Irvine 2006

Ubiach successfully demoed at the UbiComp 06 in Irvine.

Specifically on the demos, it was held on the Tuesday. We were surprised to find that the 31 demos and the 50 so posters from all over the world, were being shown over a merely one afternoon.

Our group was finalizing the Ubiach in the meantime up until this point, debugging with the audio.

Initially with at the ITP Spring Show 06, we presented our Ubiach, in a moving stuffed toy. This wasn’t a novel idea. The idea was as simple as hacking a doll and inputting our new technology into it. This time around, we collaborated with an Industrial designer, from Pratt, Taeki Oh. He has recently won the students competition with Umbra, designing a wall clock that represents time with its shadows. He molded and built a bunny’s head that replicated the mashimaro character. It was cute, snuggly, inviting-to—be-touched and fit our concept of being able to be carried around everywhere. It took him 5 plus gallons of silicon to come up with the right shape, texture and thickness. We ended up using dragon-skin silicon to get the texture desired. It’s pink in color and there is an inner mold that is colored black. The LEDs would glow from the inside to represent the eyes of the bunny, when an email is received.

We moved away from the initial walkie- talkie to walkie-talkie audio transfer and made the new model using a Bluetooth headset. A module is hooked up to the audio out on the computer-side and we hacked the headset itself and used the Bluetooth module part of it to hook up to a louder speaker that used an LM385 to amplify the output sound.

The hardware and the coding of the Ubiach wasn’t an easy task either. We had moved everything onto a perf board and found that with the audio, the output wasn’t clear at all, instead, there was a lot of noise and crackling, unlike on the breadboard. We later found out that the Bluetooth module had needed its own regulator for the voltage difference on the board. After this debug, the sound output was very clear and loud.

All the hardware was designed to fit perfectly into a wooden box, behind the bunny.

For our setup at the demos, we had a visual poster with the flowchart of the system diagram, showing the inner works of the email reading bunny. We had a laptop and the bunny set next to it. The name definitely caught people’s attention and people commented on it a lot. The feedback overall was very positive. Of course the comparison to the Nabatztag was inevitable and we were prepared for this reaction. The Nabatztag is a smart rabbit that displays the arrival of the email. It can also send emails using a voice recording and attaches as an mpeg file onto the reply email. It is also smart in that it has the ability to output weather forecasts, display the stock market, network with other smart rabbits around the world, etc. The Ubiach is different in that it can be personalized on the web. It can prioritize emails and its sole purpose it for email reading and short voice memo recordings. It can be taken away from the computer and one can receive all his emails in the form of audio. Along the lines of calm technology, the user has the choice to have it read out loud.

Other good comments we got were to continue developing on this strong concept of an “email reader.” A guy from Microsoft suggested that we use a speech to tech app to add the function of replying back to emails. He also thought that the idea of having a little bunny on top of a laptop that would move subtly when getting an email or a IM would also be effective.

The demo gave us a chance to personally demo our project to the ubicompers at the conference. People found the silicon material to be very intriguing.

I think there could be improvement on the speed of the email transfer and also with the quality of text-to-speech function.

I have a few ideas concerning the next steps on our Ubiach. More to follow.

Hard at work and the progress.