Self built Arduino light sensor, magnetic sensor, LED metronome, servo motor controller, and temperature sensor.
Self built Arduino LED brightness controller with 256 degrees and a doorbell that produce different sounds for front door and back door when the user presses/holds the button.
Self built Arduino Stopwatch that is almost identical to a cell phone stopwatch. Users can count time, set laps, and reset the timer with this product.
The idea of utilizing the displays in the public area came from my HCDE 419 final project. After a quarter of research reading HCI related articles and, I came up with this idea that embraces the concept of “ubiquitous computing” and “share economy” into the public space. The outdoor display utilization (ODU) project aims to create a solution that turns any outdoor displays into extension screens of user’s smart phones, allowing them to view customized content without taking their phones out. With ODU enabled displays nearby, users can better enjoy their lives with less distractions.
With ODU, users can access information an a more convenient way. On the other hand, the owners of the displays can also benefit from increased attention on their commercial contents.
The original research can be found here.
Based on my original project, me and Owen Hu teamed up to push the project forward building multiple prototypes to further develop the idea.
The first prototype is on paper. We brainstormed several possible content that can be displayed on a display in the public area. As the result, we sketched two ways an outdoor display works:
To use the outdoor displays, users need to enable this feature in supported Apps. This is for protecting their privacy so that they can turn this feature off. In our prototype, we used Nike+ Run Club as an example.
The second phase of our prototype is to digitize the sketch, allowing better user testing results. Following is our interactive prototype created with Sketch:
On the display end, we created multiple screens for both vertical and horizontal displays. Here are two selected screens:
In each phase, we built upon previous prototypes and further increase the fidelity of our prototype. After creating wireframe prototype for the mobile end, we made a physical prototype to demonstrate the outdoor display with cardboard and paper. The following video demonstrates how our physical prototype works:
Finally, we concluded our project with a beautiful promotional video. We filmed this video at the University Village.
A typical day with ODU:
During the final exhibit, we received helpful feedback from our peers, instructors, and visitors.
Motion Presenter is a Wizard of Oz prototype, which seems to work, but actually is faked. My team designed this prototype that aimed to make our participants believe we made a functional product. However, one of our team members, aka the wizard, was controlling the effect.
Motion Presenter is a motion capture device that recognizes presenter’s gesture and control the slides accordingly. The goal of this design is to give presenter the freedom to walk around and control the slides without going back to the computer or holding a controller.
There are four members in my team:
The way we built this prototype is by remote connecting one laptop to the classroom computer. The specific steps are the following:
After the initial set up, our wizard could use her laptop to control the classroom computer and play the slides. We then invited three participants to the classroom for the testing. We told them that we had a motion sensor installed on the classroom projector so they could use their gesture to control the slides. When introducing our team, the facilitator told them the wizard was just a note taker. The facilitator also taught participants what gestures they could use, then started the testing.
We designed three scenarios for participants to complete:
After going through three scenarios with our sample slides, we revealed the truth to our participants. One participant was completely fooled by us and really shocked when we told her that she was not controlling the slides. Another participant said she had doubts at the beginning because she did not believe we actually installed a sensor on the projector. The last participant did not believe us at all so she had no response when we told her the fact but said “Yeah I know”
Overall, this prototype was very successful. All three participants had no problem understanding and performing the first set of gesture. But for the second set of gesture, one participant was confused about video forward with slide forward, because they all required hand gesture. Another participant frequently adjusted the video volume, so the device (the wizard) was not able to capture her motion in time, thus led to unexpected volume jump. As for the third set of gesture, two participants found it hard to control the drawing speed, and the actual lines were not appearing at the locations they drew. This was more like a technical challenge, and the “finger on canvas for drawing and fist bottom on canvas for erasing” was easy to understand for them.
We think using gesture control to do presentation is a reasonable and practical solution, and we look forward for an opportunity to further develop this system in the future.