The direction of the project starts to become clear during this week. I mentioned in my report back on Tuesday that although desktop research pointed out that breathing training in sports is helpful to the athletes themselves, I am not sure if this is what the user needs. After conducting more online interviews, I find the new direction. At the same time, I also tried to connect the display and the microphone to the Arduino this week. They can all work now, but they still need further development to provide more dynamic functions.

User research

Three online interviews were conducted this week, and the participants were mainly people who had regular jogging experience. I asked them about the use of sports apps and their understanding and attempts at breathing training. In fact, all three participants with regular running habits have experience in using breath training. They all said that they will encounter many training obstacles such as attention distribution in the early stage, they mainly change to unconscious control in the later stage of training, so they feel that breath training supportive devices are useless to them currently. But they also said that breathing training had a positive effect on their exercise effect.

Therefore, I want to amend my main target users to be newcomers who have just started jogging and use this project to help them perform breathing training more easily. I also want to add long-term functions for them, such as providing statistical information to monitor the effectiveness of their breathing training. One participant mentioned that checking the pace is one of the main reasons they use sports apps.

Prototype building

This week I further built my prototype. I successfully connected a microphone, which can provide analog signal input, but the microphone value change is only obvious at a specific angle. The advantage is that the signal fluctuation caused by blowing is sufficiently obvious. On Tuesday Ryan mentioned the analysis of audio to provide users with more detailed data. But this brings more technical challenges. In fact, I only found one library to allow recording on Arduino using SD card. And some audio analysis libraries also analyze audio files. I have not found a reasonable way to convert electrical signals into audio signals in real time and analyze them. After consulting with a friend with signal processing background, I thought it was too difficult, so I chose to use electrical signals directly as triggers. But at least so far I have found a relatively stable breath triggering algorithm.

I also tried to connect a simple OLED display. I tried to draw some simple patterns using display. In the end I think that using visual feedback is a more reasonable method. My current plan is to place it as a Google Glass-like display above the glasses to provide feedback. Because the output audio is less intuitive, and some joggers themselves have the habit of jogging to listen to music. Frequent interruption of music playing for providing feedback will bring a negative experience.

Work to do

The next plan is that I will split my prototype into two parts, one for functional testing and the other for design testing. Because my device will be a portable device, its wearability is also an important part of the design. I will further develop the prototype of the function, which is to integrate the microphone and display and provide meaningful feedback. I am also considering adding sensors such as accelerometers to provide additional data input.

In addition, I will also conduct more user research. I plan to find some online resources to observe the breathing frequency and speed of athletes while running to gather more information.

Last journal i mentioned a new plan about Joystick for our project. The users can use the joystick to response to the sound from different directions in the headphone. If i choose to develope this idea, i would make the joystick in a gun and fix it on the table, then use unity 3D to run the game,which is only about the audio. The headphone would tell the story about the game and simulate the sound of enemy attack from different directions. The users can just sit on chair and swing the gun to response to the attack. This concept could solve several problem we would meet in our previous plans, for example the safety issue and connecting issues. I even have come out the story for this method. “When zombies strike, people have to defend their homes. But the electricity was destroyed and people couldn't see the zombies at night. At this time, our blind hero stood up. Our hero has super hearing and can hear the location of the zombies, so he uses a gun to shoot against the zombies.”

I have done the Arduino stuffs, and clear about the functions about.I believe it can support out concept as well.In addition to controlling the four directions of up, down, left, and right, there is also a button in the middle which can be used to control the start/end of the game.

Team Progress

In this week, we took a meeting and explored the context of our project. Based on our discussion, we finished The context of use and The thing of our project on Miro board.

The Context of Use

The Thing

Individual Progress

I recieved the sensors from Lorna this week. Thanks her a lot. So, I started to build a simple physical parts of our project using the Arduino and the pressure sensor. The LED light is controlled by the presure sensor. When I touch the sensor, the LED light will be brighter. However, the problem is that the weight must be controlled. If the pressure is too heavy, the light can't be lit. And here is the code.

The plan for next week

I will continue to design the pattern and try to change the LED light to the images on the computer or a screen. However, I think I need some help.

Week 7

Wed class

Just liken normal wed class we have present what we are going to do in upcoming week and what we going to spend time on the holiday. Most people are talking about Arduino kit they are going to follow the tutorial and familiar it. For me because I have some experience and working on Arduino therefore, I choose to review back my old product instead of doing the tutorial. Beside of that I will spend time on what target audience I am working for in the individual project. End up I am going to focus on kids there are going to use the elevator. As in the core idea I think kid usage are not consider at all first they won’t have enough word knowledge to play the game that to keep the elevator going up beside of that it thinks kids are more on graphic instead of words. Words are kind of difficult to understand for them. However, this must proof by the research, and this will be done on upcoming week.

Arduino tutorial

In this class tutor have spend lot of doing talking around Arduino basic coding and the feature. Instead of looking through the tutorial I have spent time review what I have done on deco2300 Arduino project. I have created an air pump that simulate pumping air into car tire. Which I have use a light sensor to use as input for the unity interface. The light sensor detects the light if it is darker then the normal stat it will used as input. This reflect me what I can do in the upcoming project as what sensor I should use. Because original I remember I want to use sound sensor to detect the air pump sound and it can input into the interface, however I found out that the input is not stable at all. This give me back the memory that I can try out different sensor to use in my prototype as I don’t have to just use one sensor at one prototype. I can explore more on the kit instead just staying in my comfort zone,

group work

In this week group work we have discussed our own topic and what we going to do. Especially what we going to build the frame for the elevator. Due to the limited resources I have chose not to build one instead I am going to use the elevator that located inside my apartment. Which make sense and save me a lot of time.

What is your concept?

My main focus and direction will revolve around how sounds and color would affect our target audience’s moods and focus. The direction I intend to explore relates back to our core focus on having sounds and music in everyday interactions to promote learning, predominantly in a classroom setting.

Relating to that, my concept would consist of a playmat that can be used by children that omit calming music and colors based on color theory to help children relieve academic pressures and stress or simply to entertain them.

As our team management strategy was to develop four different concepts that fall under the same domain, my responsibility for this project is to develop and prototype my own concept while sharing ideas and research with the team, as we are all working on sounds ad sensor-based technology, we would be able to share resources and user feedback as a team.

What is the ideal finished product?

Ideally, my concept would be of a larger scale, an actual playmat sized prototype that is able to detect pressure and omit light throughout the mat and not just on certain pressure points.

My concept would also be more refined, with the possibility of using more sensitive pressure pad and slimmer Flexi led pads that will refine and reduce the thickness of the mat so that children playing on the mat will feel more comfortable. Ideally, the led strips will also light up at the pressure point, having the lights follow the child when they are interacting with the concept.

User Testing

In order to design my concept to accurately reflect the needs of the target audience, I drafted some questions to be answered by potential system users. However, it was difficult to find willing participant that fall in the specific age group I am designing for in these circumstances. Responding to that challenge, I decided to then include parents, educators, and anyone with childcare experience as research subjects. I was lucky to have some mutual friends in education to respond to a set of questions outlining how children react to technology use in classrooms, color, and music associations. These interviews were conducted to have a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

results can be viewed here :

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P-88CwLs07s8fiTsA6cLBqv-gTZ115bI/view?usp=sharing

What is your concept / individual focus / individual responsibility for the project?

Under the team domain, my personal focus is collecting data through multiple sensors, the data has multiple forms, depending on the sensor I use including pressure sensor, gravity sensor, gyroscope sensor or even heart rate detector. These data will transfer to my teammate Tianyi, and he will be responsible for using these data to generate music, so each one will work on his/her personal focus and we combine our work together to deliver the final product.

What is the ideal finished product? (not what you think you can implement, achieve, but what you would like to be if you had all the resources/skills you need?)

The ideal finished product would have the following features:

• Music style changes as the user becoming tired/exhausted.
• Playing different instruments(Fitness) will get different tones as output.
• Music and images will make boring exercise more interesting.
• The user could listen to the music they made instantly.

Studio & Workshop

This week's studio and workshop are focusing on reporting back the progress of the project.

• What tech are you using?

Arduino + mobile phone + Unity, using sensors on mobile phones can be more accurate than Arduino's

• What do you need help with (Tech + Concept)?

Not much right now, because I'm still getting familiar with Arduino sensors and working on prototype constructions and I just got the Auxiliary Kit. As for the data transfer, I'm curious about either using a cable to connect with a laptop and transfer data or use wireless techs like Bluetooth to transfer data.

• Have you made any progress on the physical build?

Not yet, because I spent the most time working on DECO7380 last week.

In the workshop session, I got a recommendation from our tutor about using the Bluetooth module to wirelessly transfer data. Our team will consider whether to purchase one as a solution to the data transfer.

Team progress

This week, our team spent some time on Miro and map out our project related theme, domain, user group(s), and so on. As our team has decided to work together for the same user group under the same domain, we only focused on mapping out the parts that applied to the whole team.

We might conduct some investigations to establish user requirements in the following weeks and test our prototype.

Towards the latter part of the break, I was able to start to work properly on this prototype having received all the parts that we ordered. Earlier that week we also went around the CBD to look for suitable balls that we could use for our prototype. Apart from some Christmas baubles we o only found either coloured balls or solid balls, all unsuitable to shine coloured lights through. So for now, we are using the Christmas baubles although I want to do a materials study for the prototype after this to find what material and feel people would prefer.

We have chosen as a team to divide the idea up in parts so that we can prototype different parts each and put it together to create a whole. My part, for this prototype, is using a squeeze interaction to record a message, store that sound and making it available to be uploaded to a server so that the receiver can listen to the message, which Marie will be working on. Although the technical bit of this is relatively simple (apart from saving it to an SD card as written in a previous post) the testing will reveal some interesting information. The goal is to find whether the chosen interaction (squeeze) is appropriate for its purpose. Besides that, it will be interesting to see what users will think when interacting with the prototype and what kind of messages they would want to send and how long they would want them to be if there is a definable length to how long a message should be possible.

How far I've currently come is that nothing is done the balls looks like this

Then when the ball is squeezed it starts recording sound and the led strip inside starts wiping red like this

When the user is done recording and stops squeezing the ball it starts wiping yellow to indicate that the ball is busy readying the message to be sent, when ready the less wipe green twice to indicate the message is ready.

After som more research it seems that there is a fault with the SD card boards that we have bought and that is what may be causing the issues with saving the files. We've explored other methods of recording but have thus far not been able to do so. The last thing we tried was using JS to record sound but have not made it work yet. It looks like I won't be recording actual sound yet this prototype and be simulating this. I'll probably include this in a later prototype but for now it's much more important to finish to create something that will give some valuable data for further development.

The ideal product the way I see it would be a selection of balls which other users can send messages to, those messages can take the shape of sound, images, videos and other media content, whatever users want to use to tell their story. The point of this is to take the experience away from conventional messaging systems and make the experience special again, more along the lines of the intimacy you get from a handwritten letter rather than another message on your phone. I also would love to create a wall of favourite memories and stories. The Idea is taken from the movie Inside Out where you have a wall with memory balls if they are not interacted with they fade. The idea behind this is to encourage the user to remember good memories to create a healthy emotional state, especially during challenging times.

Midsemester

I didn't get to do a whole lot over midsem as I had to focus on my master thesis. However, during the first weekend, Thomas and I went into the city to find some suitable spheres to work with. The most optimal ball we found was plastic Christmas decorations, as they were both transparent which would let us use lights inside and somewhat squishy to allow for a squish interaction. These balls weren't ideal, but definitely enough for us to get our first prototype up and running given that we aren't going to focus on form and feel for the first prototype. Towards the end of midsem we received our parts in the mail, which at this point had been delayed for about six days. Thomas and I, given that we live in the same household and that we are working on two sides of the same interaction, started to test the parts (SD card reader, microphone, speaker and lights). I had some progress working out a solution with pulsating lights for a notification feature by sending in RBG values through the serial port, simulating the data transferred from another Arduino.

Week 7

As for the weekend leading up to week seven and until Thursday's workshop, except for the regular stand-up at Tuesday's studio, I spent all my time trying to work out an issue with the SD card reader. Both Thomas and I was working with SD card readers, but none of us was able to make them work. We received some help from Steven and Ben after the workshop which led to us figuring out that the SD card readers had a fault in them so we had to give up on trying to make it work. Steven and Ben suggested that we could look into streaming over serial, make use of a raspberry pi instead or use a computer to simulate the interaction of voice recording and playing the recording. Having looked into the complexity of streaming audio over serial, and not having time to learn a new tool we chose to pursue the option of using JavaScript to record and play audio from the computer-based on input from the Arduino. I tried to look up how I could use JavaScript to record and play audio files, but soon after ended up stuck again not being able to get this to work either. By this point, since I hadn't had a day off in weeks I chose to take a couple of days to rest.

Concept

My team chose to work on the same concept and divide it into smaller prototypes that together make a whole concept. The overall concept (E-mories) consists of a basket full of spheres that will double up as an emotional sharing platform and a decoration in the house. Each sphere is capable of recording and playing audio for people to send each other messages. When a user wishes to send a friend a message, they simply pick up a sphere and squeeze it to start recording. When done recording he or she can then shake the sphere to choose a colour corresponding to the mood of the message they are sending. When the user is happy with their combination of message and colour they can throw it up in the air to send the message. On the receiving end in another household, there is an identical basket of spheres. When a message is received a sphere will start to glow in the colour the sender chose to notify the receiver of an incoming message. The receiver can then pick up the sphere to listen to the message. The concept tries to facilitate and encourage positive emotional sharing for people that are unable to meet face-to-face and give them a sense of being closer to each other through a physical platform.

We divided this concept into four parts, where mine revolves around the receiving end of the concept, where I'm looking into how to show a notification of incoming messages and play the audio recording.

In an ideal world, I would say that this concept included more than two senses, as in not only audio or lights. I would like the concept to include deep meaningful memories that people wish to share with one and each other consisting of smell, video, images, sound, touch and more. My personal idea of the concept is for it to contain complex combinations of memories consisting of the above-mentioned factors and for users to be able to build upon old memories with new memories and reflect on their memories together. However, given that we have yet to prototype test our current solution it is difficult to say if this is the correct path to pursue.

I have been searching for the existing technology that can help us with the voice changing part of our design. It seems like there is a bunch of toys that can be referenced. For the first prototype, Anna and I will work on the flower part together which we plan to simulate the voice changing and color changing of petals functions.

I will also work on the user experience testing, feedback evaluation and alternatives building. I will draft the user testing plan with the application of a suitable methodology for each prototype. This becomes challenging as we cannot physically meet, which is the main constraint for most of the user testing method. However, on the other hand, some online testing can be applied, which can provide us with qualitative data. I need to explore more about how to set up a most adaptive user testing plan so our prototype can be widely tested and have enough data for us to investigate more alternatives in our team domain.

For Tuesday's studio class, we had a stand up as per usual, talking about how far along our team have come in the process and what we are planning to do next. I find these stand-ups to be wasteful given that we spend a lot of time doing something that does not move our project forward. I would prefer it if each group had their own breakout room and a tutor came by to check in on the progress as this would be far more valuable.

After the stand-up, we moved on to an online exercise using the tool MIRO. Our task was to find a way to conduct user research in COVID times and how to get valuable first-hand data without the need of meeting face-to-face. For this task, I looked up a youtube video of passengers on a train and observed their behaviour. Although I can see why the teacher team wanted to make us student open our eyes to the possibilities that still exist, I didn't find it overly helpful as the exercise wasn't relatable to conducting a prototype test, which is the next assessment piece in the course. I find that I get the most value out of meeting- and discussing with the team instead of performing stand-ups and these types of tasks as they take away time that we could have spent on our project.

The next task on MIRO was really helpful to us. Even though we already had a good understanding of our concept, it is always nice to map out the complexity and fully comprehend the quirks and commonalities of the project you are working on. Our team sat down together and went through our concept and tried to map out as much as possible to further define our concept as can be seen in the pictures below.

From this exercise, some new questions emerged that we had to take into consideration when working on our prototypes and conducting user research. These questions were such as: "does it need to be a ball?"; "is flashing lights the best metaphors for incoming messages?"; "is sound the best input and output?"; "Can it be anything else than a bowl?"; "Is squeeze the best interaction?"; "Is the living room the best place for it?" and more. These questions are important to consider moving forward and to include in our upcoming user research. Moreover, from this exercise, we did figure out that our target audience was rather vague and needed more working on.

On Thursday we had a Arduino tutorial. Having already worked with Arduino previously I found the content too basic and decided to instead focus on refining the assignment prior to delivery. Moreover, our team sat down to order the parts we needed so that we could get them in time for our next deadline. We decided to purchase our parts with express delivery to get a headstart on the prototype.

Studio and Workshop

Our proposal report was due this week, so we spent a lot of our team time and free time working on it. However, we also spent some time during the studio session on Miro board, and had some discussion about how to access users for interviews and observation during the current lockdown situation. Our task in class was to find a way to observe passengers on a train from where we were sitting, and then discover some other ways we could observe passengers remotely using different techniques and technologies.

Then we moved on to team boards, and spent some time mapping out our theme, domain, user group(s), and so on, in relation to our concepts. As my team has decided to all design separate concepts for the same user group, we only focused on mapping out the parts that applied to the whole team.

I found both these exercises quite helpful, especially in terms of getting ideas for how to do user research under the current restrictions. It was also nice to get a more concrete layout of the design space and user group we needed to focus on.

The workshop was focused on a basic introduction to Arduinos. I have used an Arduino before, but that was nearly 2 years ago, and I'd forgotten most of it. Thankfully, once I started going through some of the activities, it all came back pretty quickly, and I'm feeling a lot more confident that I'll be able to take on any part of my concept that may end up using one.

Report and Individual Concept

As mentioned before, our report was due this week, and we spent a fair bit of time as a team figuring out which aspects were part of our team section, and which parts we needed to write about individually. We decided that a lot of the general background research we had done, as well as our user group and context of use, were similar across all our concepts, so that became part of our team section. We then put all other aspects relating to our individual concepts in the individual sections.

As I had finally decided on my concept at the end of last week, I spent some time this week trying to visualise it, and create a preliminary design sketch to be included in the report.

I don't entirely know how exactly I will achieve all of the functions I want, but after the Arduino workshop on Thursday I feel a lot more confident about the electronic aspects I might need to tackle, and I also trust the experience of the tutors to be able to answer any questions I might have.

What is your concept / individual focus / individual responsibility for the project? Include a text-based description and imagery to support (sketches, photos etc).

The individual concept that will be created for the project is a 14-sided dice, to teach multiplication up to the 12 times table as this is what is taught in primary school maths. Each side, except for one, being the blank side, will represent numbers from 0-12. If the blank side is rolled, the student can choose the number. The image of the paper prototype dice can be found below.

Each digit, 0 – 9, is assigned notes or a bar/s of a popular tune. If a 12 is rolled then, the sounds representing 1 and 2 will be played to the user. For the 0 – 4 digits, it would be the same notes and bars played with different tones and pitches. The digit 0 would produce deeper sounds for the particular bars compared to 4, which would be higher. This would be the same for 5 – 9; however, they would be assigned different notes and bars.

The focus is on allowing children to multiply 2 numbers; however, if they wish they can multiply multiple numbers. How the child interacts with the concept is to pick up the dice and roll it. The side that is facing upwards will light up and the sound/s corresponding to that number will play. They will then do the action again until they have rolled the numbers they are going to multiply with. Once this is done, the user will throw it up in the air; this lets the Arduino know that the next sounds, notes or bar/s that is produced from the user’s objects will represent the answer. The sounds produced will then be compared to the sounds stored. If it is similar, the main melody of the popular tune will be played; however, if they are wrong then a different, unpleasant sound will play.

Each side of the dice will be coloured a different colour to represent the numbers and help users know which object to use to produce a certain pitch or tone required for the answer. The objects will be the user’s own equipment; therefore, they will have to assign the digits to the object.

Each digit will have a set colour. Consequently, the number 10 would be assigned a colour produced from mixing red for 1 and black for 0.

The interactions that will be required for the user to use the concept involve rolling the dice to pick the numbers, lighting up the chosen sides, playing the corresponding sounds and throwing the dice in the air to let the Arduino know when to check the produced sound with the stored sound.

What is the ideal finished product? (not what you think you can implement, achieve, but what you would like to be if you had all the resources/skills you need?)

What I would like to achieve is to build a solid, unbreakable 14-sided dice that rolls like any proper dice. All sides would be slightly opaque, with different colours, allowing the LED lights to shine through, however, it would not be completely seen. The main form would be the dice, and the user would only interact with that product; therefore, all the sensors such as the accelerometer, microphone and LED lights would be contained within the dice.

How the user would interact with the finished product is by rolling the dice where the side that faces upwards would light up and play the sound/s, note/s and bar/s. Other interactions would be to throw the dice up in the air and then compare the sounds produced from the user’s interaction with their school supplies/stationery to the sounds stored, rather than faking the functionality with the laptop. If they get the answer wrong, then an unpleasant sound would play from the dice or the main part of the popular tune.

Studio

It was great to get back into the studio after the break. I think I was pretty productive over the midsem, and I think this was validated during report back. As I have previously mentioned, I was able to get colour mixing to work and settled on potential audio tracks to play for my colour mixing

I also reached the conclusion that I wanted to move away from emotional intelligence within my individual design direction. I believe it was getting overly complex for the target users and this was validated in some follow up discussions I had with some experts. My main task for the coming week is mapping out how my physical interaction was going to be implemented and finding an effective way of incorporating audio.

I had some further discussions with an expert user and an interesting point of mixing sound was brought up. The expert said that they would expect the sound of yellow and red mixing together should sound like orange - not an overlayed track of the two. I had completely overlooked this perspective but believe it is a more effective interaction approach:

Workshop

I was super happy with my progress in the workshop. I mapped out how I will likely separate my digital interface and physical interaction for the next prototyping round. This can be seen below:

I then went on to msp out a potential circuit for my physical interaction in addition to how I intend for my buttons to be activated. I think I am happy with using two pieces of a yoga/gym mats with metal attached to each piece. Foam will be inbetween the two to stop the metal from contacting. When pressure is applied to the top layer of the mat, a signal can be read in from the arduino to my digital interface:

I also made a crude prototype of my mat out of lego. I think starting small scale might be a good way to approach this:

Next Steps

I want to eventually test my yoga mat and foam theory on my lego prototype. But first I need to get a yoga mat, sheet metal and some foam.

In the meantime, audio and Unity seems to be the way to go. Finding ideal and royalty free audio clips is proving to be more difficult than originally anticipated

Inspiration

My tarot cards came in the mail the other day!! I pulled a card at random today and got the sun - it means joy, success and positivity. So consider me inspired!! Good things are to come!!

In my last journal, i proposed a IR solution to our project concept that the users can use a remote controller to interact with the receivers in four directions. I Just used one receiver to figure out its functions last time. But there would be four receivers in our project, so many unknown could exist. For example, will the receivers interfere with each other and how, could one remote controller control four receivers and so on. So i got another IR receiver from my teammate and explored my concerns.

Receive 1 (R1) comes with LED 1 (L1), Receive 2 (R2) comes with LED 2 (L2). I put a notebook between the two receivers to block the signals. I found that the receiver would only catch the default signal value only if the remote controller aims at it directly. It would produce different values if there are angles between the remote and the receiver, which means the range that can receive the signal accurately is very small. The other biggest trouble i met was that L2 would light up randomly when only the L1 were supposed to be on. I fixed my codes thousands time and tried various methods to block the signal to prevent mutual interference, but the whole system messed up all the time. At last i realised that the IRremote library i donwnloaded might not support multiple receivers work together, and finally i found the supportable library.

Now, this method has been verified to be feasible that i can interact with four receivers in different locations by one remote control at one system. I pressed button towards R1,L1 was on, and L2 was on when i pressed button towards R2 like the images below.

When i was struggling with the problem, i came out another Plan B as an alternative solution to our concept. I could make a joystick in a shape of gun and fix it on the table, so it can only shake in four directions on the spot. Players can pull the trigger in the direction they heard the enemy attach in the headset. I am going to try joystick before we get the tools we need. Besides, we are going to buy Electric iron，long wire jumpers, hot melt adhesive and speakers.

Unfortunately, we are still waiting for the package of the Arduino kit we purchased. We have now simulated most of the work through the computer, and also completed part of the code work. Because our initial plan was based on the Laser tripwire system, so laser makes the most critical part of our entire project, we can not complete this project without this kit. Of course, to prevent accidents, we have prepared a Plan B.

First, let me introduce the circuit we originally planned. In simple terms, it is composed of two parts system, laser, and laser receiving system. A 9v battery powers the laser. The main component of the laser receiving system is the photoresistor. When the laser light hits the photoresistor directly, the resistance value will change. This will help us detect the movement of the sword. The other main component is the speaker, which can play our storyline and some task prompts to assist the user in completing the task. And can provide some sound feedback. For now, our initial plan is to use four speakers (four sets of Arduino in series) to complete the entire project foundation. On this basis, further improvements are being made, including the possibility of using headsets in the future or using VR technology (the user base will change).

Regarding our Plan B, we have now completed the first test with the existing Arduino kit, and the results show that this solution is feasible. Use the infrared remote control and an infrared receiver to form a system to replace the original laser receiving system, so that our game interaction may change from sword to firearm. Tomorrow we plan to buy some necessary tools, such as electric soldering iron, hot melt adhesive, and some wires. I hope that in the next week, we can successfully receive our package.

Individual Concept

Our team has decided to continue to develop the concept together but create individual prototypes from different perspectives. Our concept is a digital figurine that changes based on the environment it is placed in, encouraging a change in energy saving behaviour through negative reinforcement.

I have decided to base mine around the target demographic of families with school-aged children. This means my prototype needs to be fun enough to keep the children engaged but not too childish to deter adults from getting involved. It also needs to be not too complex to confuse children but complex enough to provide the appropriate data and outputs to encourage a behaviour change.

My current plan for form is based around my initial idea of Artificial Conscience. This being a hard outside with an LED grid to show facial expressions. This is because I believe it meets the requirements I have set: to be fun; and encourage an emotional connection to be formed. I still need to test whether this form is most appropriate.

Ideal Finished Product

My ideal finished product would be a polished-looking outside (made out of either laser cut frosted acrylic or 3D printed), that changes colour, makes comments if a user walks past, plays sounds, and vibrates. To turn the flashing lights, vibrations, and sounds off, the user would need to perform an interactive activity (still needs to be determined).

Work Done

This week everything started happening for my project! It started off a bit rocky when I got sick, putting me out of work for a few days. However, I'm really happy with the work I have done and am excited to continue working on it next week!

Studio

In the studio on Wednesday, I had some really good discussions with my team about how we were each approaching the project and offering advice/help where we could. I'm really glad I've got such a good group that are still keen to work together where we can.

Workshop

On Thursday, I had my workshop. I found this class super helpful as we were able to discuss with Ben and Steven how we were going to build the project. We were asked to define what we were building and how we intended to build it. My answers to these questions were:

What are you building?

Building a figurine that measures the temperature in the room and matches it to the current temperature outside. If the temperature is too similar, it will change colour, play a sound, and vibrate.

How do you plan on building it?

• Use temperature sensor and compare that to weather API
• Use strip lights to change colour
• Might use the vibrating mini motor to make it vibrate
• If I have time I want to add something that senses when someone walks past (don't know how to do this?)
• Use speaker to play sound - I'm thinking of just having a list of comments that will randomly be selected and do text to speech (Audio Amplifier Module with Speaker for Arduino)
• Still figuring out interesting way to turn it off

After discussions with the tutors, I decided to try to use the ultrasonic sensors (provided in the auxiliary kit) to detect if someone walks past or comes up to Emily. They thought the rest of my ideas were appropriate solutions, except the weather API. As I don't have access to a wifi board, I will either have to transfer data through a connection to my computer, or just use dummy values. I have decided to add a potentiometer to my board so that you can easily change the temperature to see its effect on Emily.

Outside Class

The rest of the week I have spent building and programming my Arduino. In particular, I have 2 functionalities working. I decided to focus on the temperature and lights so I could easily see when the temperature was acceptable. I also got the ultrasonic distance sensor working. I decided to start with these two functionalities as they are the main features needed for my MVP.

Temperature

Potentiometer recording the outside temperature that changes the colour of the LED strip of lights if the difference between this value and the recorded indoor temperature is too large. The strip of lights will turn red if its too hot (outdoor temp - indoor temp >= 5), blue if its too cold (indoor temp - outdoor temp <= 5), and green for everything else. However, once I got this all working, I noticed that the lights tended to flicker on the edge of normal to cold and normal to hot.

I fixed this by implementing hysteresis. I did this by recording the state of the temperature as either hot, cold, or normal and then changing the acceptable degree range depending on this state. For example, if it was currently in the hot state, it only requires 3 degrees to stay hot but 5 degrees to change to hot. This meant the LED strip didn't flicker as much and provided much more consistent feedback to the user.

At the moment, the connection to the potentiometer is very inconsistent but hopefully this can be fixed once I solder it.

Ultrasonic distance sensor

Ultrasonic distance sensor detecting if the user approaches Emily or walks past. At the moment this just makes the small LED light turn on (red) but will eventually be used to trigger a comment from Emily.

My final set up looks like this:

I have also been thinking more about the form and might look into 3D printing the outside as this could potentially be easier than trying to piece together laser cut acrylic.

Work to Do

Next week I want to try to get some text to speech working so that Emily can randomly select a comment to say (based on the state) when someone approaches her or walks past. I also want to try to work with a grid of LED lights to make facial expressions to add more character to Emily. I also want to conduct some user testing to determine an interactive way to turn these features off.

What is my concept / individual focus for the project?

Emily is an energy-saving product that monitors the users' energy consumption and alerting them of any misuse. My main focus is on families who are familiar with technology and are likely to incorporate it into their house and interact with it frequently. This alters the assumptions that may occur about the users and the way the product is designed for the user to interact with Emily. As many adult users are aware of what is good and bad energy use, my focus is more on constant reminders and changing of habits rather than learning about it. The user will be able to interact with the product via sight, sound and potentially touch. The user would be able to alter the inputs and then respond to the outputs. Whilst the outputs should be annoying to the user, it should still be perceived in a playful manner so that the user doesn't just dismiss the product and stop using it.

This is a sketch of my planned form with the inclusion of materials that I have proposed to use and technology that I hope to incorporate into the form.

What is my ideal finished product?

My ideal finished product would be able to detect multiple misuses of energy such as: if the airconditioning/heater is on and it's the same temperature outside, if a door to outside was left open while the airconditioning was on, if the lights or TV are left on when no one is in the room or if the shower was run for too long. I am currently envisioning a snowman that users can incorporate into their house and create a connection to. Ideally, the product would be made out of a hard plastic that is translucent enough so that users can see light colour changes and hear sounds but not see the contents inside. The device will react by flashing/changing LED lights, making noises and vibrating to attract attention in a playful yet slightly annoying way. The user could respond to the device by touch and then have a change of action (ie. stopping the bad habit). It could also react to voice commands but still requires the user to stop the energy consumption habit immediately otherwise the device will react again.

During the mid semester break I didn't end up doing as much as I wanted but I still made some progress on the project. I worked a bit on trying to finalise my form.

I played around a lot with protoputty and although it is very interesting and fun to use, it has just been too difficult to get to work properly for me. As my target user group is families with young children, it's really important that the form not only looks good but is also durable and I don't think this can be achieved by making the entire prototype out of protoputty.

I've decided to not go with protoputty and make the outside out of laser cut acrylic with frosted glass paint to hide the insides but still let light through. I've been working on creating a template that I can cut out of wood first to check that it all works. I've also been looking at using a weather API to match the room temperature to.

Related Work

Now that I'm leaning toward using a laser cutter, I've been researching ways to make it look cooler than just a plain box. They did show us this method in the UQInnovate induction but I kind of forgot how cool etching looks! I think I could add some nice detailing to the form to create a bit more texture to the acrylic.

This week I was building my prototype inputs. My individual focus was to help kids learn math. I came to a toy shop to find some inspirations and I decided to start working on the multiple buttons inputs. Since I am going to let kids inserting the sticks to learn number fist, so I can use buttons as the insert inputs. Once one button is pushed, the value on serial monitor will count up.

Next week, I will start work on the voice input and output if the auxiliary kit arrives. It will be used to give auditory feedback to the kids and let them know the questions and instructions easily.