- Voice recording pad into LM386 to amplify sound out

- 20 Second voice recording module

- Another voice recording module

IM reactor/reader - Ubi.chat

WirelessSpeaker - Ubi.play

Materials

- I can try and experiment with different kinds of candy- research and field trip (halloween is coming up!)
- there is that orange-marshmelloy-peanut candy that sort of hardens with time. what if the rug/ chair could be morphed over time to really fit the user's body form?
- explore all colors and lighting behind them
- whilst discussing my material options with Kate and David, marshmellows can be sealed into a clear bag that can be lit up? - get instant sealer from carolina

As a tactile, touchable, reactive light piece

- a blob like light piece/ fixture that would react to one's touch. the intensity of the light could change with different touch using QT113 and QT301

As a morphable, lighting chair piece

- experiment with material that would allow for morphing/ shaping over time
- bean bag that would morph over time (filled with cotton candy?)
- family of different charactered chairs

We all have fond memories of candies from our childhood. We all remember our favorite kind, the smell of them and how they felt in our hands and how they tasted in our mouth. Candies can also take us back to a certain nostalgic moment of our past. All candies come in different textures, smells and thicknesses. In multiples and masses, they bring out an amazing texture and glow when given the correct lighting and form.

I want to explore an unconventional usage of this edible material to make a living furniture piece; specifically a rug, that would pleasantly surprise the user.

I will attempt at making a blob- like structure to accentuate the original form of the candies. This piece plays on the idea of repetition and patterns. The structure is formed with different candies and a big piece of white spandex fabric.

All furniture pieces should accommodate to and comfort our natural body form- blob-like, smooth, un-cornered, un- straight-edged surfaces and contact areas. A comfortable piece of furniture ought to mold right into our natural body form. I will create this ideal piece that can be personalized according to different users.

What I envision in one-liner

An organic structure that takes the form of a rug that would light up around (the aura) as one touches or lays on it.

au‧ra 
–noun
1. a distinctive and pervasive quality or character; air; atmosphere: an aura of respectability; an aura of friendliness.
2. a subtly pervasive quality or atmosphere seen as emanating from a person, place, or thing.
3. Pathology. a sensation, as of lights or a current of warm or cold air, preceding an attack of migraine or epilepsy.

Initial BrainStorming

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.

November 2006


December 2006

More to come... Busy preparing...

Jane and I worked hard until the final day to the Spring Show 2006.

We had simplified our CandyStore Project into just three different interactive candy jars that each had different personalities. We also got bigger, plastic jars to allow us to give more space to hide the hardware under the candies. All three were triggered as one would dip their hand into the jar, for a candy.

We came to three big candy jars that would glow, scream and pop up as one put their hand into them.

Since they were all triggered by touch, we decide to use the QT 113, one channel touch sensor. QTs are very finicky to work with, in that, the sensitivity differs drastically depending on the setting and the electrode; the sensing part. The electrode pin is most effective when placed closest to the QT113 as well.

We had first attempted to try everything out on a breadboard, got it to work then would transfer the exact layout onto a perf board, realizing that it no longer had the correct sensitivity. We decided to set up everything as it would inside the jar and went from there.

The solenoid module was hard in that it required a much higher voltage and amperage than what the breadboard setting could provide. We tested using a bench top power supply, and noted that with about 24Vs, we were able to get the correct “popping” motion that we wanted in our jar. The QT would sense the touch, then would trigger the solenoid. This part is done using the PIC. Since the PIC runs off of 5Vs. we were to use TIP120 to send data from the PIC into the TIP120’s base pin, sending it a high and low.

The glowing of the DOTs essentially came to PWMing the individual LEDs embedded inside the GumDrops. This also required high lowing the base pin on the TIP120.

The screaming jar gave us complications. We first used a 20 second voice recording module from Radio Shack. We hacked into the play button the module. It was the one similar to the one found in the WalkieTalkie from the UBi.ach Project. The pressing button has one strip of conductive metal that completes the circuit as it is pressed on. Since the module is also separately powered by a 9V, we used a TIP 120 here as well. We got it to play back as touch was sensed but with time, the board would just get hotter and we burnt out two of the boards. After seeing our frustration, Todd suggested that we work with an MP3 Player instead, simply turning it on and off when the sensor was triggered. We used a relay to turn the sensor on and off. The exciting part of all this was the usage of the plasma sheets. We attached the sample sheet around the jar, instead of using separate speakers inside the jar. The screaming recording came out really nicely with this output.

At the Show