I tried hand detection in processing, it looks quite good in video, but actually not. In video, I set the perfect light to find hand ( actually blob for processing) ,so if light changes, it loses its function. I coded this program to find the biggest and brightest blob, but I totally need a better algorithm. source : http://itp.nyu.edu/~hj657/ICM/ICM_1024.zip
My physical computing croup decided to make little light following robot.
Our little robot will drive around trying to find a beam of light coming down from above it. We will use a laser cutter to make the bus, wheels, and other structural components. We also want to try and not use any pre-fabricated board, instead only using the micro-controller, motor controller, and other discrete components. We will program and prototype using the board, but then move the chips, motors, circuits etc into the little housing.
our inspiration!
This is the first step for our robot. We just tried to make motors move with arduino, but I think it is a meaningful step !
Sam made this amazing site, I wanted to make use of this site’s data. Therefore, here it is, ITP Guess Who Game. This is simple guess who game, this game delivers the parsed data from the site. Texts displayed on the background is kind of hint, it is the description for the person. Now, this game has 20 rounds, too many rounds maybe ?
This week, I played with tone and servo. It was interesting to use switch as analog input with different kinds of resistors. At first, I couldn’t understand why all buttons are connected to 5V, but now I understand the characteristics of parallel connections.
Play with tone
Play with servo
Making real movement by servo motor was exciting. My arduino board kept turning off because I couldn’t find exact positions of capacitors. I put capacitors backwards, that was why capacitors were so hot and board did not work. According to introductions, it could even explode, hew…
Dealing with texts is always more difficult than with simple shapes. This sketch is very slow in open processing, perhaps because I did not optimize all codes.
Open processing link : http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/73714
Anyway, I am trying other kinds of IDE such as Eclipse or Sublime Text. Eclipse has been always good for java development but too heavy. Sublime is super pretty and light but a bit annoying because I always have to turn on the processing ro tun sketch. Dilema ! 
One good thing in making images by code is that this enables us to disassemble our visions. Let’s say that I want to create a couple of circles which are not that boring. When we draw this ellipse in GUI program such as photoshop or illustrator, everything is so smooth so we almost forget what elements are needed for drawing the circle. On the contrary, when we want to draw something by code, we need to know all elements which are necessary for drawing, we need coordinate of center, color, stroke type, weather to fill it or not and etc etc… This process makes the visual cognition unnatural thing, and makes us to find more abilities of our visions.
look same?
However, we tend to focus too much on visions, it has been true since 18 C when Kant underestimated the sense of the touch. We have connected the touch to feeling or other kinds of sentimental things, not to scientific analyzing, this is the writer’s awareness issue. The author refutes this typical defining of the touch, and shows some examples of people who lost their body parts but still feel phantom part stimulated by other parts than original ones. The author argues that if the sense of the touch is contructed in certain ways, we can seize the sense and represent it.
The author’s examples are amazing, and I vaguely agree with his opinion. The author says that if there is a market, there will be the future of the touch. The thing is that I am so used to using my eyes, so there are not many rooms to imagine for other senses that sight. How can I or we expand our thoughts beyond the sight? I think this questions can be linked to the question in the reading for 1st week, ‘What is good interaction?’. The answer for this questions was ‘ Somethings which make full use of our senses.’ Efforts on the future of the touch would be useful of course, and it also would expand our imaginations.
I want to start this post with mentioning my interactive installation. When the audience opens the box, the camera in the box captures the audience’s face to make it displayed on the stairway. Then, whenever the audiences step down the stairway, the part displayed on the stair breaks down.
Break Me from SungJin Nam on Vimeo.
Personally, I really like this work (even though it is mine, whatever ). This is the first piece that I could show my work to public. When I finished the this installation, I was so so so tired, fell asleep with full of heart. However, my phone rang and woke me up. It was the curator from gallery, she said that she would put a sign on the box, “Open the Box”. I said “Shit, no, never do that.”, but she called me just to inform me, not to ask about my opinion.
Well, I have to admit this, it was true that this piece seems to fail to attract people to open the box naturally, because my coworkers and I wanted to avoid typical interactions. Though Tom Igoe said that there’s a lot we can add to the thing already done in his article, we felt like avoiding typical things including video mirrors, body-as-cursor, or LED things that have occupied the modern art gallery before. However, in terms of interactions, ‘typical’ might not be the bad word. ‘Typical’ means that people are already too familiar with something, they know how to make something work without any efforts to figure out. Moreover, as Norman said, poor interactions cannot be covered by the label. If I failed to make people to interact with my work, the failure is reflecting my work. If I should attach long long statement to my work, it would be better to make games with thick manual book.
However, I still believe that struggling for new interactions is valuable, especially in art field. Even though un-seamless interactions will sometimes need self-explanations and bother the audiences, some ( or few) of those things would be able to expand the way audiences expand. Moreover, these experiments cannot be done in industrial field in which all people are working for perfectly comfortable interface.
