Last post I talked about the glove we were using as input to control visuals and audio on a computer.
I actually continued working on the visuals in processing to see what sort of shapes we could get. These are quite rough, but show how we could get the visuals reacting with audio, and key presses.
While me and Matthew were mucking around with this however, Clint came over and asked about the more physical aspects of our project. Even without the makey makey to test electronics, he suggested playing around with the gloves.
Matthew and I went off and made a cord out of tape, then tried just using the gloves in various ways. We attached our tape cord directly to the gloves to see what that would feel like, and what sort of restrictions having cables for electronics might bring.
What we did not expect was how dull the gloves felt to use just for tapping on an arm. Being welding gloves we felt the need for something more physical, such as putting restraints on movement, or using big expressive movements.
(My notes from our planning)
We thought about using chains, elastic restraints and weights, but nothing really seemed right, or fit with the Visual and Audio components.
We put the ideas on the back burner to revisit after we gave our presentation, mainly to give us some more time to play around with the ideas we were having.
After giving the presentation, we got quite a lot of feedback. I had a talk with Michael about how Matthew and I were feeling our input lacked interest, but that I was also not to sure which direction to head in to fix it.
Today we had a group chat about where we are at. Michael explained he had talked to Clint, who recommends removing the digital visual aspect of our project.
I got us to jump into https://aggie.io/ (a collaborative drawing tool that I have used before when discussing projects remotely). The tool allows everyone to do rough sketches of what they are thinking instead of just using words.
By removing the visuals, we got to focus on how the user would interact with audio physically. Michael brought up the idea of opening a chest the plays a sound, and that got me into thinking about us using physical objects that the user can interact with, such as a tree, cube or water bottle.
Each object would have a certain soundtrack attached to it that could be affected by sensors hidden on that object. One idea Michael said that I quite like was attaching an accelerometer to a water bottle, and having it play a waterfall track the increases in power as you tip the bottle further.
I feel we are heading on a much more interesting track now. Next step will be to create some sort of simple physical object we can test audio interaction with.
