Dhruv Adhia – Hello Universe

Humanizing Technology, Part 2

// June 3rd, 2010 // 7 Comments » // opencv, organic media, Technology, Thirdimension

At my company we mostly work with wireless technologies, and by wireless we open our minds to ambient intelligence, computer vision, sensors and so forth.

Today I was performing a small experiment by connecting Unity which is a game engine, openFrameworks which combines all the opensource libraries and Arduino which is a microcontroller. I wanted to tweak animations with analog and digital sensors as input. So today I set a task of playing the animation when LDR (Light dependent resistor) has certain value. I had a threshold as a condition above and below which animation will be played and stopped respectively. In arduino I had a circuit setup with the code and it basically turned on the LED if value of analog sensor was above certain threshold. I had set the threshold to be 512. The value increased if the surroundings were darker. So basically if you place your finger on the sensor, LED will turn on and when LED turns on I wanted to play animation inside Unity.

Videos are in two parts as I had to capture both tangible and non tangible aspects of my experiment. Today I was also trying to combine smile recognition, so that is also included in the video.

Part 1

Arduino+OpenFrameworks+Unity Part 1 from Dhruv Adhia on Vimeo.

Part 2

Arduino+openFrameworks+Unity Part 2 from Dhruv Adhia on Vimeo.

In short the whole experiment is divided into 3 parts.
1) Arduino which serves as input in the form of digital and analog sensors
2) openFrameworks which serves as middleware like a controller between input(Arduino) and output(Unity)
- In this program it takes analog light level inputs from arduino through serial bus and passes the information to Unity. This is one of connecting arduino to Unity which can bring interesting results.
- openFrameworks is passing the center of the human face detected and is also detecting the smile.
3) Unity, which is were we would see output at least in our case at Dsign Interactive. My team consists of creative and art director, so taking advantage of all our skills we thought of integrating our interactive elements with Unity which is a good game engine for doing 3d programming. It can serve for other interactive 3d elements as well.

So now I can think of tangible interfaces to control interactive elements inside the game/animations/digital art exhibit.

This is what I vision in future of hardware and virtual elements integrated seamlessly to bring unique experience. For me the unique experience are more inspiring to create rather than addictive ones. This is one thing that I have learned from Nature. Don’t get attached, but grow with unique experiences. And I think that’s what makes us humans a technology should be mediator driving the purpose. This is in a way an example of biomimicry. A design that is inspired by nature.

Signing off, Humanizing Technology part 2. More parts will come soon.

Humanizing technology

// May 18th, 2010 // 6 Comments » // antarikShamM, opencv, organic media, Technology

At Dsign Interactive systems in Vancouver, Canada I am leading the project for the development of core product in terms of its design and implementation. The company had touchless interactive systems working in past but it was crashing. I am reimplementing the system using openFrameworks and Unity integrated with bumblebee2 camera. I have got basic connections laid out between devices and platforms. So that now I can move a 3d model with a wink of my eye. Here is a video showing detection of various parts of the face using core openCv Library.

Open Cv Face parts detection on Mac from Dhruv Adhia on Vimeo.

I think technology has definitely come to the point at least for some of us who understand the need of humanizing technology rather than we becoming like machines in front of machines. Its the time we want our computers to react in a human way, understanding human gestures for better communication. I would consider this as one of my first practical steps towards what I call “Organic Media“. In future, I see we have organic sensors integrated into computers which recognize the organic surroundings as well. We have been putting heavy load on software side in terms of pattern recognition and computer algorithmes. But to me I think its a fine blend between software and hardware that can lead to the balance in technology that humanizes.

Design and Technology can come from anywhere

// May 9th, 2010 // 7 Comments » // antarikShamM, Technology

Anil Gupta at TEDIndia articulated on the point that most of the true Yogis have been saying about spirituality and highest attainment. He basically said that technology and design can come from absolutely anywhere and anybody! You don’t have to be researcher, professor, scientist, technologist to invent something new. So he strongly focused on the point that poor people can do it too. I encourage everyone to look at the efforts of HoneyBee network.