Prototype 12: First Working (ish) Prototype

Here is my prototype working (well sort of). I have managed to successfully export the mesh as a STL and import it into appropriate software. A quite interesting accident happens when you press a personality and apply it more than once.

Further work to do

I need to add the option to create more shapes but I think that it is important to iron out some of the more major bugs first.

Bugs to fix

1. The shape variable slider does not work, I will have to hard code the variables to change the size. This is ok for a dodecahedron as there is only one variable but for other shapes, this may cause problems. I want to have it so that you show the space and then as you change variables, the variables of the shape change.
2. The personalities teasing and secretive work but not very well. I want to try and make twist work better. Also, these two seem to rotate in the viewport when around a global axis rather than a local one
3. The way the all personality sliders work is not that great, you have to select a value and then press the button to generate. I want to have it so that you can alter them in real time so that you can see how the values affect the shape more easily.
4. The reset button does not work – I have no idea how to do this yet… I am still thinking about it.

Applet download

Open Processing link

The Applied Anthropomorphic Language

This series of images demonstrate how my chosen personalities can be mapped onto the Tailored Tangible Research Artefacts. I am proposing that each personality has a button that initiates them and a slider which controls the scale of each personality.

Base Shape: Dodecahedron

Personality one: confrontational Modifier: extrude

Personality two: nagging Modifier: noise

Personality three: teasing Modifier: twist

Personality four: friendly Modifier: catmullclark

Personality five: divided Modifier: planar subdivide

Personality six: secrative Modifier: skew

Tangible Research Artefacts: Implementing Choice

After exploring the Hemesh processing libraries, I have been experimenting with creating forms and then modifying them. The image below is a screen shot of a sketch that I uploaded onto open processing:

A lot of visualisations, like the one below and those seen in Moere, A.V. and Patel, S. paper (1.) are abstracted representations that require a level of explanation for their meaning to be understood. A researchers connection to his ‘things’ is very emotional and personal, bound by complex relationships so in the context of the Tangible Research Artefacts, the researcher needs to understand what the form means and its representation for it to be a rich resource for them to use. A researchers connection to his ‘things’ is very emotional and personal, bound by complex relationships. I want to make the form transparent in its meaning to the researcher and they can choose to share this meaning with other researchers or hide it to themselves. Therefore, there needs to be some connection between the variables that drive the form and the artefact that is produced. The researcher needs to have a role as being the maker as well as the consumer.

My proposed system for the processing software is to create an environment that associates certain modifier functions (from the Hemesh libraries) to certain attributes of the documents. For example, twisting a shape to represent secrecy. For simplicity, I am first going to focus on just pdf files in the development of my prototype and then build on this complexity.

To create this level of customisation I have been experimenting with creating a GUI (Graphical User Interface). The aim of this is to enable the researcher to quantifiably apply their emotion or feelings to the artefact.

To implement this GUI I have chosen to look at the ControlP5 libraries and I have uploaded some of my experiments onto open processing, an example of which is above.

Refrences

1. Moere, A.V. and Patel, S. 2010. The Physical Visualization of Information: Designing Data Sculptures in an Education Context. In Visual Information Communication, Huang, M.L. et al (Eds.). Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

Author wall

Author Wall from Electroland on Vimeo.

Author wall is an installation by Elctroland where a collection of authors are projected onto a wall and controlled by a touch screen. When you select an author on the touchscreen, the authors biography and famous quotation is projected onto the wall. I personally feel that this is a poor piece of interactive architecture and I find the information presented both meaningless and useless. A user is given a random selection of authors to choose from which may or may not bear any relevance to the user and the information provided is nothing interesting or useful. However, if we put the poor content to one side, this projects underlining concept has some credit and is something that could be used as a base to work on. An application that sprang to mind was the way we use libraries and the Patina project. What if the list of authors that we see collected on a screen were related to us. This could be achieved by scanning the ebooks on our tablet and profiling us to make a best match judgment of adjacencies of authors. As our search through new relevant authors continued, the matches to new authors would further develop. These links between other relevant authors could continue further into the software too. As well as linking with new authors, the software also has the potential of linking new authors with your existing e book collection.