Video editing and document writing

This week I've spent writing the prototype document and editing both my own and the teams video presentations. It took a lot more effort and time than I anticipated, but its mostly because I wanted it to look and feel professional so I spent extra time adding elements to improve the overall experience. I started with filming the parts that needed live footage from both the building and interacting with the prototype. I then made some animations in after effekts so illustrate what the narration was talking about. I think my video ended up being pretty good at least I'm quite happy with it.

Going forward

I've been thinking a lot about what kind of improvements I can add to my prototype after the presentation on Tuesday as I've concluded the basic intended interaction + added some additional features. As mentioned before I conducted a user testing which provided useful feedback. Not only for my prototype but also for the the concept in general. Several additional features was suggested and some could be relatively easy to add and will increase the user experience. What I think is the most important element to remember is to keep the concept user friendly.

I hope the presentation on Tuesday will go well and that my team and I will be able to write good appraisals relatively quick since there are a lot that will be happening going forward.

On the Tuesday of week 4, we had our group presentation on a topic which had to be novel, interactive, fun and physical. We had decided that we will be going with the topic of teaching people about global warming with an interactive device. I think live presentation in front of a classroom would have been a lot more fun because we were planning on having volunteers to come up and do a small demo of our concept. But, cause of restrictions we decided to make a video to explain our concept as demonstrating the concept online-live through a skit would have been very difficult.

We had divided into different tasks that everyone in the group will be researching about and preparing for the video. I particularly looked into explaining the problem space. I recorded my voice using my phone (which did not have the quality that I was expecting) and sent my part of the presentation with the recording to Kasey, who was editing the video together and had the rest of the voice over. Eddie had planned to do the skit for giving a demo of our concept with his housemates.

After our presentation, we received critique feedback from the class, all the teaching staff members on slack and via zoom.

After that, we talked to Alison and clay in a private zoom room on the things that we can improve and they helped with different ideas. The main aspects that we talked about were how to make the input more interactive and who will be our target audience.

Later in the week, we had a group meeting to discuss about the proposal-report. We also tried to discuss the various input methods that can be replaced in our original idea, but we failed to do so. Hence we decided to meet again on Sunday where everyone would bring in 2 ideas for 'ways of input' and bring in 2-3 research paper related to any aspect of our concept.

I had mostly researched global warming and sociology, and teaching children about global warming which I shared and summarised to our group. One of the input methods that I preferred that I thought of was having 2 garbage bins as the inputs. One for plastic and the other for biodegradable things only. Depending on how much each bin weighs, it will affect the globe accordingly. such as if the plastic garbage bin weighs more, then the earth will turn grey and brownish with sounds on cars honking, whereas if there is more biodegradable things or less plastic the globe turns green and blue with sounds of birds chirping and rivers flowing. But the only problem that we discussed with this way of input was that it was too binary, like before when we had received the feedback about our presentation.

Eddie came up with another Idea of input where we use a strip which can take our inputs via our finger. We will be able to glide across it to input.

But we still have to research more on the ways of inputting.

Later we also divided the sections of the individual report to make things easier.

School had paused for a week due to the COVIN-19. I didn't know the pandemic would become so extreme to the point that we had to shelter in place. I have been quite emotional about what everything had happened, especially for the change to this course. I was totally looking forward to the exhibition at this end of this semester because I had heard lots of good things from the people who had taken the class. Also, I had seen the exhibition last year; it was so fun and amazing in the works they had done. I was so keen to make something cool and memorable to show in the exhibition. To have a formal exhibition outside of the campus was definitely an unforgettable experience. But I am sure this online class is going to be a unique and historical experience for everyone. Anyhow, I will put into the same effort that I committed for this class and make the best out of it.

This week's online class on Zoom was new, and it was interesting and fun that seeing everyone visually for a short time (before it crashed). We still manage to efficiently run the class, watch the presentation, critique others' work, and communicate. Thank you for the technology so that we could still run our classes due to the restriction we had. Overall, I think it was pretty good except on Tuesday the Zoom crushed in the second half of the class, but we still got the work done that is all matters.

Looking at other teams' presentations, I felt most of the concept was pretty well developed and fit into the requirement of their domain and the requirement from the brief to have open-ended and playful in everyday life. However, few were still need to develop it more within their domain and to move away from basic interaction.

Our team

We were happy that we finally got it done. The result was not as good as what I was expected because it missed out on an essential point that we forgot to include in our presentation. We forgot to mention in the skits or in the slide that the global color would change in the cumulative process approach rather than just based on the individual input. Therefore, from the feedback we got, people were missed understanding a little bit about our concept. It got pointed out in most of the critiques, which I was appreciated because I didn't realize until I see the critique. We totally forgot about adding it because it was our initial ideas when we conducted in our meeting.

Based on all the critique we had, here are some of the things that our team needs to look at: no binary option for asking the users about global warming, need to have a specific target user, a specific location for our activity. We are going to refine it more in our next meeting.

We had a quick chat after the presentation with some of my team members; one was not available due to some personal work. We all look at the critiques we got and pointed out some critical issues in our concept that we would need to address. Later we chatted with tutors and asked questions about how we could use different ways to ask the question without binary options? What specific target users could we possibly be the focus? Where should we have the activity? Is the interaction sufficient? I know it may sound like we didn't think through in our design process; however, we were at a point none of us could have any new ideas. We all that everyone was responsible for global warming since we all lived on the planet. It was too broad, and we need a concise user group. We glad that we talked with the tutors, and they provided some very useful information on how we can approach our project.

Using smoke, smell, water, and maybe use sound was still something that we would want to include in our project. Conversely, we would still need to do more research about it.

Individual process

I did some research for inspiration for our project. I want to see if I can find people who had done similar projects or installation, but instead, I found some images or illustrations. It was close to what we would want for our installation to be. It was fun when I was doing the research, and later I also made some sketches. Besides sketching and finding inspiration, I was also helping to put all the presentations together.

What's next?

Our team had a Zoom meeting on Friday and Sunday to talk first filled up some information with the member that was missing from the meeting after the presentation. We all go over again to address how we are going to have different ways of input. We were also looking at the team proposal paper together and discussing in each section to understand what we need to write and what information we would need to gather. At the end of the meeting on Friday, each of us needed to have 2 ideas about different ways of input and read two academic peer-reviewed papers before we had another meeting on Sunday.

On Sunday(today), we had a meeting at 3:30 pm, and we shared what we had found and the summary of the academic papers we read. We go over the paper again and start signing the job by section. Hopefully, we would have done a day before the due day and not last minutes again.

Here are the notes I took and some were from the academic paper:

What am I exploring?

I was not sure what individual work I would want to do earlier today because I felt smell, smoke/fog, and water were all so cool to make. I couldn't decide which one I want, as I am doing more research on how to make smoke and watching many videos on YouTube. I think I am keen to make smoke for my individual prototype. I figured that I could make fogs instead of smoke because they have a similar look of the effect. I know one is from water other is from fire. Maybe I could use fog to substitute from the smoke. I will ask the tutor again when we have our Zoom section on Tuesday. I hope I could do it; then I can start ordering supplies online so I can start working on it. Since I have never done it before, I want to have enough time to play around. While I was watching YouTube, I am so looking forward to building it.

Here are some of the links I found:

Mini Smoke Machine for Cosplay - YouTube

DIY Super Powerful Fog Machine under 10$ - YouTube

Teamwork

This week as a group we worked on our concept, iterating through the problem space and how the concept would solve this problem, then creating a storyboard and detailed explanation of the product, all of which was used in the presentation on Tuesday.

Problem Space

In the group my main focus was on developing the problem space, the main issue we feel 'Helping Hand' Will solve is a form of social distancing but devolved through wanting to be polite and not having to tell others what distance you wish to keep depending on your mood or what we called 'Social Activity' Listed below are three examples and thus the social distance they wish to keep from others. These might be a bit extreme however they get the general idea across. This problem space made it quite easy for us as a group to then develop the concept to better solve this problem, through gestures and motions used to keep others away (rude) or inviting them to come closer (nice).

Post Presetation

After the presentation there was numerous feedback, however the main concern was in the form of the concept, creating a robotic hand that creates complex gestures might be too hard to do, too heavy or creative that it attracts attention when the user wants to be left alone. This is where the group split into individual workers, to develop their own form they would like to work on, and what role that fulfills, personally I really like the emotion and 'sass' that body gestures can make, so why stop at a hand, I want to make a small moving mannequin that conveys these gestures of rudeness or being inviting, while being simple with maybe one joint per limb, making it easy to pull off, while the whole body can convey emotion better.

Emotional Birds

Looking back at our presentation, I believe we managed to cover a lot of information and give the audience a good sense of our concept. Our team started to go through the feedback after Tuesday's session and will continue to go through the rest in a separate meeting on Friday. From what we have seen so far, the concept fell short in the everyday aspect of the brief, which we will discuss in further detail on Friday's meeting. We have already looked into how the concept could be moved into a household, so it might very well be that we end up pivoting from our original concept during this week. There was also some feedback related to a lack of output interactivity. This is something we have to look further into as we believe too many features might take away from the core purpose of the concept and rather be a distraction. More features aren't always better. Moreover, I believe a concept could just as well focus on one place of interaction instead of splitting the focus between two places of interaction. With that said, we're going to discuss this in further detail on Friday's meeting and might end up with a different concept by the end of this week.

General Thoughts

I found that most presentations were, for the most part, within the requirements of the brief, with a few exceptions. Most concepts had minor issues only which I think is natural at this stage of the development as ideas are still rough and unrefined. However, there was a lot of potential and creativity in the various concepts pitched. My only concern is the feasibility of many of the presented ideas. It is nice to see the ambitions and dreams of a finished concept, but I do believe several teams will soon find it more difficult to create than what they initially assumed. Especially those who seek to measure emotions in one way or another. It is definitely going to be interesting to see how the various team will prototype their concepts and see the concepts evolve as we move forward in the course.

My feedback

Fire safety using audiometrics

Consider how it can be made accessible to the elderly given that the concept users AR technology. Some people might find it difficult to use and navigate through a phone screen.

Could probably be easier if used with AR glasses instead of a phone as it will react to body movement instead of having to point a device around.

In terms of immersion, I would argue that VR is a better option as AR lacks the same sense of depth. If that is important to the concept that is.

EMS – enhanced mundane spaces

You could consider AR to open up for multi-room play/inclusion.

Consider using different sound effects for each household tool and how they all could be different games that support one core gameplay.

Team Zoomista

Could you use a combination of a touch interface and body as a controller to make it even more interactive?

The Nagging Cushion

Will the user actually have to carry the pillow? This seems like an additional hurdle to overcome to use the pillow instead of just having a 'away from pillow' timer and general trust of users

Team Garfunkel

How will users be able to distinguish between which item makes what sounds. Given that music is a combination of several tones it would be nice to distinguish between various tones on sight, a connection between the sound and the physical item.

Team Twisted

Could this work with only one user? E.g., after having stopped on the yellow colour, you will have to move over the other colours to get to the apply pad. You should consider how people won’t mistakenly activate another colour when walking past other colours.

As a colour-vision impaired user, I would definitely enjoy having something that separates hue, saturation and lightness for me to help me understand what colour it 'actually' is given that many colours can look the same. E.g., use voice, text or icons to further distinguish colour combinations.

Also, as a colour-vision impaired user, I find HSL to be the most helpful way of learning and distinguishing colours.

Lome

Consider using the already developed voice assistant on various phones to be the sound input of your device given that some of these already use AI to understand language and tone. This could also provide users with a sense of control as they have to speak to the phone to activate when the device is actually listening in on conversations.

Ninja Run

Consider how you could use the physical space other than just horizontal block alignment to visualize what happens. E.g., could blocks be stacked on top of each other to visualize the number of times a loop runs?

Consider how you could teach other things too, such as HTML, CSS not only scripting languages or programming languages.

Helping Hand

Could it also help people get into social situations, not only shoo people away?

Bata Skwad

What is the connection between the problem space which talks of device sentience and the concept pitch presenting a maze robot?

How does a robot giving suggestions and ramming into your leg fix the problem of devices not working for you and people not trusting tech.

It sounds like the machine is focused on a really broad set of functionalities; can it be scoped down?

Mobody - Handy Aero 2020

It seems rather similar to leap motion. Could you make use of this existing technology and improve upon it to use other body parts as controllers in addition to hands?

Fitlody

It would be interesting to see if it could work both ways, as in the music adjusting to your actions and you having to exercise according to how the music and floor lights change.

Give me a beat saber version of fitlody.

Team Hedgehog

It could be interesting to have a visualization of your movements after the game finishes.

Could be interesting to use sound to navigate around in a dark room / maze.

Negative Nancies - Energy Saving

Maybe giving Emily ‘human or animal traits could help the users care about the messages it gives.

Half-ice no Sugar - ITSY

What will the various interactions do? E.g., what will an ear twist vs an arm tug mean, and how will this correlate to a specific learning outcome?

Output could be glowing patch, heat, buzzing.

Team Triangle

Is there a timeline where you can build the music sequences using these vials? It’s a nice and creative way of capturing, mixing and playing with music. How would sounds mix? Are there any controls to adjust the volume of each sound, when they enter and exit and so on?

Team 7

Could it be something else than a game or add it as a gamification on top of some mundane task to make it more of an everyday thing?

It would be interesting to explore how to teach people of danger signs, such as teaching users to sense dangers using electro haptic feedback.

Team CDI

Could the elevator take you to the wrong floor if you are performing the incorrect dance move? As in not stopping there for you to walk the rest of the floors but move one floor closer or further away for each successful or unsuccessful dance move.

Think about how dancing in the elevator may impact people who are uncomfortable in the elevator to begin with, that wouldn’t enjoy people jumping up or down.

concept: instead of elevator, use a horizontal escalator such as the ones at the airport. It could be a joined effort to make it move faster and would look like a neat line dance for everyone else watching.

Team Zookeeper

It would be more interesting if questions were difficult to choose between as in would you take a train vs a bus and what ramifications will the various choices have.

Could questions be based on activities in your home so that people become more aware of their choices?

Team Hi-distinction

Could you move away from the screen to make it less similar to consoles with motion sensing? Could boxing output some interesting artwork such as being interpreted as different hues and saturations to colour in an image and hitting certain areas to colour in that area?

Last week we got grouped into teams. My team turned out to be with Tuva, Thomas and Sigurd with the theme emotional intelligence. Already the first day we had a meeting since the pitch was supposed to be the following week. Since I was not at school that day due to a sore throat(yes I called health services and I'm safe) we had a meeting online where we determined some basics and the time for the next meeting. The following Friday we had a meeting where we did some ideation and came up with our concept. The idea surrounded a display of emotion with the users actively doing something which then would be displayed in, for instance, a colour. Also in the meeting we drafter a power point and decided who was gonna do which part. I volunteered to make some sketches and draw up a storyboard.

Because of the resent development caused by the corona virus the presentation was delayed and also made digital. I therefore recorded my part of the presentation so that my team could assemble a short video presentation instead.

I was scared for a moment that the course would be closed and that I wouldn't be able to finish my degree this semester but thankfully it is going to be made digital instead. But this also means that a lot more of the work will be done individually which means that for a lot of the part forward I will be working alone. I had some initial ideas that I could work further on that was not taken into consideration when we discussed this in the group meeting, so I do look forward to that actually. I'm both nervous and excited to see what this course have to offer in the nearby future and hopefully will be even as exciting as it seemed to be at the beginning of the semester.

Inductions

This week started with the soldering induction, which to my surprise was a lot of fun and I learned a lot about it. I had actually done some soldering before, but that's a long time ago and it was nice to freshen up the knowledge. In the end I manage to make a small light device with a working switch and battery.

In addition I attended the space induction which was only a walkthrough of the room and equipment available in that room. Overall, I think I have done all of the required inductions and look forward into starting to make something physical for the main project.

Presentations

The presentations for the classes individual ideas were held this week on both Tuesday and wednesday. I noticed that there were a lot of the same basic elements too many of the ideas, especially the use of sound and different ways to display emotion.

My own presentation went well but in all honesty I'm not all that exited for my idea. In the end it felt a bit mixed with different ideas merged into one confusing device. The feedback that I got from the peer reviews was mostly good. The ongoing concern however was whether or not this was a good way to wake up in the morning where one said that is was a "brutal way of waking up" and that it might not be safe. Another comment was that there could be a different way to set the alarm other than using a smartphone. It was also a concern if people would care that the covers were removed and that it would have not effect. One person also didn't like the idea of using negative experience to change human behaviour.

All of the comments had a good point and raised concerns that I have thought of myself, especially the concern regarding the removal of the cover and if it has any effect. If the idea at any point would be considered for the main project all of these concerned must be reviewed before the decision to make this device.

Relfection

In today's session, we were inspired by other ideas presented to us by fellow peers. Although each presentation was succinct, most who presented today conveyed their ideas and concepts with clarity.

I noticed a trend in ideas whereby emotions, shoes and music were hot topics regarding individual concepts.

Tasks completed in the session

Feedback

It was very useful and effective in completing these critique forms as each student presented. This was an effective way to ensure we were engaging in the presentation and also providing an opportunity to provide valuable feedback.

Idea Explanation

Concept - SMART BEDROOM

Utilising the most recent AI and heat-mapping technology, it will allow the SMART BEDROOM to map emotions in the body.

The bedroom will respond to the human’s emotion accordingly. Responses by the AI incorporate all 5 senses to help better the emotion/situation.

CONTEXT OF USE: Retirement Home - BEDROOM

Motivation

In today’s society, there is a constant battle to help those who are battling with mental health, and in particular the emotions of the elderly and children. In today’s society, there is a contestant emphasis on ensuring the quality of life and healthy personal well-begin.

Emotions originate in the brain but can manifest as physical feelings throughout the body. Given the demographic, accessibility and university access is a major factor to consider. As a result, this does not require conscious human interaction, rather the AI will detect and action accordingly.

Affective computing is an essential part of current HCI. This technology allows for automated human affective behaviour recognition. This type of recognition is provided by means of the capture and analysis of implicit information about the user, such as vocal and facial changes, alterations of body movements and gestures, and so on. Recognition of affective behaviour is a part of effective interaction where a computer approaches the emotion, mood, attitude and personal preferences of the person. Adding the ability of emotional intelligence to computers makes them more coherent to the humans who interact with them. Light and colour are omnipresent environmental factors which influence the human being.

Light and colour are ubiquitous environmental factors which have an influence on the human being. Hence, light and colour issues have to be considered especially significant in HCI and fundamental in affective computing. Affective computing aims to integrate issues dealing with emotions and computers.

Inspiration

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