Studio II Physical Computing Journal

We have spent the last two week gathering materials and building for the physical design along side with Dekke helping with the coding.

The container for the laptop had formed and we just have to spray paint and dig some hole for the scroll bar senser and the button to go in. The weight senser still needs to be built as we have not yet worked on that yet.

The time seems to be running fast and we spent a lot of time on this project.
we have all worked hard

Let me show you how hard working we are. (Just slack on updating blogs)











SEE HOW HARD WORKING WE ARE!!!

Yeah~I will try to keep up with the blog

Tomorrow we will do the spray paint and maybe some work on the physical container.

After Presentation 2, we have started the coding and building of the physical design.




We are considering using old laptop from itee department. This is a old Dell laptop.

We are using MDF board and some pine wood to make a container to hold the laptop as below.



We had may (more like LOTS) if help from Dekker for the coding part.




we are using PHP and flash for the coding where php stores all the data and flash talks back to php for the informations. In between there is cake php which according to Dekker that it would be much easier to use (which is true).

Been very slack with the blog didn't really update anything

so here are some catch up updates.


After the first presentation we have been giving comment on considering more on the psychical computing sides of the project and had gone through the design again and made some changes.

Since the second presentation we had mad a lot of changes and have focus on one main function which is the shopping list function as it was the most popular chooses from our audience.




The idea is to re-use old laptop to performance the coding as act as the screen instead of having multi-touch screen as it seems to be lack in sustainability and physical computing.

So far with the project we

are just doing some interview and gathering result to finalize our functions for the

message board.

The following are some of the interview thaw was conducted.

the first one is from my friend and her family.

The second on is Marie's family and her kid's friends and their famiy

Touch interface and physical computing has become one of the most popular technology these days, it can be part of our everyday life e.g. a touch phone or computer.

The video I saw and was very interesting was the concept interactive mirror by Lit studio and interference inc. They aim at creating something that is exciting for their users, things that could be apart of their daily life. This mirror was based on the inspiration form the phillips interaction mirror (the future bathroom), the one with dielectric glass mirrors and built in LCD panels, they thought this idea was too nifty, lack of human-touch and un-fun so they brain strom and came up with their own version of the touch interactive mirror.


You can draw thing on the mirror and you can also change colour for the things that you are drawing



You can also change and design your own T-shirt by selecting different image and place them on the blank T-shirt


This one is fairly interesting as you can view and look at this paragraph of text from many different angle and views zoom in or zoom out depends on the direction and angle you touch.


This is a mini game, you get 5 points for every little alien look a like thing you touch :D I thought it was pretty cool to have a big mirror to have touch interactive game.

You can also write words on the mirror with different colours so this could act like a message board, you could leave message for your love ones on the mirror...etc and plenty things to do. I think that this piece of interaction mirror concentrates more on the side of the human-touch as the creator had mention it's more about having fun and a good time rather then having this multi-function embedded, it's looking at what sustainability and physical can do in a more different point of view.

Obviously the products that we are going to create will not be as high tech and as detail as the interaction mirror but this short video will provides a huge inspiration to a lot of people as there are always many possibilities that we can create in a multi touch products. This piece of design shows and proves that physical computing and sustainability are essential for creating a sustainable life style and most of the function that was embedded in the interaction mirror create fun and exciting experience for the users, giving them something different to express them self. It's not just a tool for your everyday life it's something that you can express your feeling with.

The piece also match with not only physical computing elements but the sustainability criteria that has been discussed many times in the class as it's part of the design. The piece of technology produce sustainable to the users which improves their quality of life and well being.


This image is from the philips creation of their version of interactive mirror which is part of their future bathroom, I though this function was pretty cool so I will mention a bit in this entry. The mirror has built in info red senserr so it will detect your height and the mat that you are standing on will have your weight. It will provides information about the user's current health being, also giving strong awareness to the users by representing the health status with a meter that goes from 1-100 and green to red on the mirror. (It is similar as the idea that I had for the smart scale)




***Source and Reference***


Blog.LizStudio.com, 2008, ‘Interactive Mirror, http://blog.litstudios.com/index.php?/archives/14-Interactive-Mirror.html (viewed at 13th March ,2009)

Interference Inc., 2001
http://www.interferenceinc.com/ (viewed at 13th March, 2009)

CTitanic, 2007, 'Interactive Mirror', YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4DI2J4O1-k&feature=related, (viewed this site on 12th March, 2009)