In this weeks reading ”Physical Computing’s Greatest Hits (and misses),” there were several types of projects that I’m familiar with. Besides a few of them, I’ve had firsthand experience with these types of projects. I think most people are familiar with floor pad games like Dance Dance Revolution, multi touch interfaces and tilty controllers such as those in phones and the Nintendo Wii. In my last job, I ended up building a few Drawdio kits, a pencil mounted theramin device. The projects that are most compelling to me are usually the ones with the most sensory interactions, such as sound inducing theramins, mechanical pixels, some forms of tilty controllers and “fields of grass” projects. They all take advantage of at least one sense, whether it’s in a way that’s unique, like the theramin or familiar like the fields of grass. Mechanical pixel projects, like the wooden mirror take advantage of sight to create an image, as well as sound, producing pleasingly life-like sounds that indicate change. The specialization required to create these kinds of interactions usually limits the functionality of the project; all a wooden mirror can do is produce an image: but less specialized projects, like hand as cursor ones, usually produce interactions that barely take advantage of one sense. Sight is almost always involved, as well as sound, but these occur in ways that are screen based and typically don’t make the user feel like they’re interacting with a living object. Other patterns of physical interactions that I see repeatedly in life are swyping (like a card), turning (like a key), pushing, pressing buttons, sipping (like a straw), blowing and speaking.
Tone output lab documentation:
For this lab I ended up substituting a second photo resistor for a force sensor. Fun results.