A summary of the last five weeks:
In the last five weeks I’ve been working on a product for this brief:
http://ahointeractiveproducts2015.tumblr.com/post/132141183826/inventing-interactive-products
Short summary: Make an interactive product using Arduino. It must have one input and one output and be put in a context. I decided to work with marketing as my context, and interactions between people. In particular hugging, witch I think is one of the friendliest and most delightful interactions between people in the world.
What I essentially did was to make a “hug-o-meter”, It’s a machine that measures how good a hug between two people are, and that gives a instant visual feedback (the arrow) on how well the hug was preformed, and also a reward if the hug was sufficiently good.
The build was rather simple. A large poster(left in the picture) with a scale for reading the hugs’ value, and a measuring device(right in the picture) witch was to be the center of the hug.
The reward in this case was two pieces (one for each participant) of chocolate covered biscuit, that also provided the marketing context for my project. Manufactured by Freia, “Sjokoklem”, witch translates to “ChocoHug”, is one of my favorite biscuits. Fortunately it’s very poorly marketed and fitted well with my idea for the hugging machine, witch in turn made it a good choice of context.
I posted the code I used for the Arduino earlier.
The components I used for the input was two pressure sensors, witch feedback together calculated the value of the hug. This was so that one person less easily would max out the scale. It worked brilliantly, To reach a good score, pressure would have to be applied from both sides of the “hug-o-meter”.
For the output I built the instant feedback arrow from a servo engine. I would also have liked to make the chocolate ejecting mechanism, but it proved too complicated in the short time between user- testing the experience and prototyping for the exhibition.
Regrettably I was too preoccupied with handing out rewards and tending to som unforeseen complications during the exhibition to remember to film people using the machine, but the response was good. Especially when two full classes of fifth- graders came to have a look at what our course was about.
All in all a great semester, and a very cool brief!