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.
