Antony Tam Design Blog

Sustainability Staircase – Research Documentation

atdesign121 — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 11:18:13 +0000

1) Measured the width, height and angles between each step of the stairwell.

2) Research and considering on how the infrared sensor could possibly install and work well in the staircase.

3) Researching about the side affects of the LED light when install.

4) Experimenting on mixing Red Blue and Green LED light to generate more possible colors.

5) Experimenting the LED light brightness and light extending area.

6) Experimenting with the mixed LED color and trying to fit in a custom made metal plate, but the inner width of the metal plate can not fit in a 10mm LED light bulb.

7) A custom made RGB LED circuit board.

Experimenting the LED light with a reflectional surface metal plate within the staircase and testing the brightness of the LED during day time.

9) Testing the Arduino program for the time frame of the LED light when trigger by a mouse button.

10) Soldering the infrared sensor and all other components onto the circuit board.

11) Metal plate width and high resized to a suitable size to fit in a custom made circuit board.

12) Installing the LED and the wire to the metal plate.

13) Testing the brightness and color of each LED light box

14) Final installation complete.

Executive Summary

atdesign121 — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:45:11 +0000

Goals

The purpose of this project is to use a Arduino board to create an interactive installation that shows sustainability and improvement for our environment. Therefore, I chose the staircase in between the first and second floor in the Wigan building. The majority of people would use the lift to travel from first to second floor to avoid using the stairs. If they keep using the lift for short distance travel, it would be a massive amount of power wastage in the long run.
To encourage people to use the stairs for the short distance travel, I decided to create a visual art piece by using LED lights in the stairwell at the base of each step. The LED lights will use as a primary light source to illuminate the room when people travel up and down the stairs.

Concept

My initial idea in this project is to build a massive amount of LED lights that are manipulated by an infrared sensor. The LED light will illuminate the room when the user travels from first to second floor. The user will see different coloured LED light each time they travel through the stairwell and the color that appears will indicate the time during that period (e.g. red = 7pm; blue = 8pm; yellow = 9pm and so on.). If no one travels up or down the stairs for longer than a minute, the LED lights will turn off for energy saving purposes. I will put a reflectional material behind the LED light to increase the brightness of the LED.

Installation

The installation of this project will need an infrared sensor installed on each end of the stairs, so when people travel up or down the LED lights will still be able to operate. There will be twenty LED light boxes installed on the stairs and each of the light boxes will contain eight assorted colors of LED lights and Ten LED lights for each color.

Project Resource

To achieve this, there is a list of equipment which is required for use within this project:

LED color: Deep Red, Red, Orange Red, Orange, Amber, Yellow, Yellow Green, True Green. 200 for each color.
Reflectional metal board x 20.
Plastic Board x 5.
Two Infrared Sensor

Location Research (Tepapa/ Water Front)

atdesign121 — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:46:40 +0000

Location Research (Civic Square)

atdesign121 — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:32:45 +0000

Location Research (Botanical Gardens)

atdesign121 — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:37:00 +0000

Brilliant Idea or Colonial Cringe?

atdesign121 — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:19:17 +0000

Please click here to download the PDF Proposal
For many years, the Parliament buildings in Wellington remained unfinished. In the early 1960’s, the current Prime Minister, Keith Holyoake, began plans to complete the 19th Century style building. The government architect at the time, Ferg Sheppard, refused to follow the original plans to complete the buildings and because of this, Keith Holyoake had to look elsewhere if he wished to have it completed in true 19th Century Style. Sir Basil Spence, a popular British architect, was consulted as his modern approach to traditional designs caught Mr Holyoake’s attention. In 1964, Sir Basil Spence travelled to New Zealand and when asked about his approach to the project, he revealed designs of a building now considered a New Zealand icon, The Beehive. Holyoake quickly accepted the design idea and commissioned Ferg Sheppard and his team to construct the new Parliament. Sheppard had his doubts about Spence’s desgin as the circular shape which it was based around was not a suitable for an office environment. By 1970, the “Beehive” was well underway, but in the process of its creation, had upset many New Zealand architects as they felt they should have been consulted on the design of such a prestigious New Zealand building.

Goals

The purpose of this project is to convey what transcribed in the process of building the Beehive whilst including the important historical message using an interactive hardware to enhance user excitement. Therefore, the design of an interaction switch or button will become the first priority within this project, so the physical form of the switch or button needs to be user friendly for all age groups. Also, I have noticed using image or video to describe a story, effectively aids understanding of the history behind where the building came from, so within this interaction design I will use image and video as key points to attract the users attention.
To achieve this goal, research on the background of Parliament and related information is necessary. Apart from researching Parliament history, I will also present a collection of videos and images that will bring a strong message to the user. These videos and images, combined with the static text, will provide an informative, interesting and interactive way to learn about this historical building’s design and creation.

Concept

My initial idea in this project is to build an educational and interactive work piece that enhances user interest in the selected historical information. To achieve this goal I will use “Quartz Composer” to create a patch that will attach with to a video camera. The camera will sense the distance between the user and the selected work piece. For example, when a user stands in front of the interactive video which will portray information on an event that occured during the Beehive’s design process, the user’s postion will influence the background of the visual which will play a raindrop or wind blowing animation to demonstrate the nature environment in Wellington. When the user moves closer to the visual, the animation playing in the background will fadeout and be replaced with historical images and videos about the Parliament Buildings. Users can control the speed of the image and video slice by touching the designated button. Through this interactive connection between the user and the informative visual, users will find the information interesting and therefore will absorb more.

Installation

There is no particular age group or target audience for this informative visual, but I have taken into consideration that the physical form of this artwork needs to be a suitable height, size and scale for all age groups. Therefore, the button setup (switcher) should be trouble-free for all users to operate. Because of this, I have come up with two different installation setups. The first option will have two buttons (by using a wheel mouse) preset on the floor. To operate the button, the user will simply step on the button surface to control the speed of the video or image that appears on the screen. The second option will be two laser sensor installed in front of the artwork surface (by using a optical mouse). The user simply moves their hand on top of the laser surface to control the speed of the video or image that appears on screen. Due to the limitation of hardware knowledge and lack of practical experience, the physical form of this artwork is still in the idea stage, but within the coming week I will determine the physical form and setup along with the hardware that I am using (Rolling Mouse or Optical Mouse)

Current Status

I am currently modifying a few patches that I have found on Futurismo Zugakousaku’s website, as some his artwork inspired me to develop my idea for this project. I have merged a few of them and seen the outcome, but have discovered that the mouse did not function as I was expecting. I will try debugging the calculation between the X and Y value within the macro patch, and I believe if I could over come this issue it will become an exquisite artwork.

Project Resource

To achieve this project there is a list of digital equipment which is required for use within this project:

Digital Video and Images that are related to the Beehive.
A digital video camera
A projector or LCD monitors.
An Optical Mouse and Wheel Mouse
A computer that has Mac OS X Leopard and Quartz Composer installed.

Quartz Composer Experiments

atdesign121 — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:57:30 +0000

These are the experiment that I’ve done so far:

Experiment 01) Colors transform frequently within the image and cube box pops up in the middle and controlled by the mouse pointer.

Experiment 02) Color transform and image breaks into pixels.

Experiment 03) 3D rain drops pattern

Experiment 04) Pattern flies around the space and controlled by the mouse pointer

Experiment 05) An online update RSS feed.

Experiment 06) Recomposition the image automatically

Experiment 07) This patch is using JAVA to run the text and fall in the background

Experiment 08) Graphic flow around the space and controlled by the mouse pointer.

Experiment 09) Images flow all over the screen and illustrated graphic will pops up between images.

Proposal

atdesign121 — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 11:34:56 +0000

Click here to download our PDF proposal

Introduction

A general overview of our ideas and goals for this game for example transport education, fun adventurous game, etc.

As we are the “Mass Transit” group our initial ideas are to have this as an underlining focus and feature of our location based game. We want the gaming experience to be educational and fun at the same time. This gave us our target audience straight away, we are aiming it at school children aged 8 – 14. This would mean we could turn the experience into a school field trip so they would be in teams and accompanied by teachers.

When dealing with children we have to think about how to keep their attention, so we are going to use a story to draw them in. This story will have characters that interact with the user via video, audio and text that is sent to the iPaq when triggered by their location. The game will involve many choices that they can make which will lead them down different paths. The game will involve using the Wellington public transport as a means of getting around on this adventure and completing missions
as well as walking, cable cart , etc.

Target Audience

8 – 14 – Why have we chosen this age?

We have chosen to focus this game at children aged 8-14. We are looking at making the game for school children so that it would take them out of the classroom for a day and really get some hands on learning out public transport in Wellington and how it helps our city become carbon neutral.

The way this could work is that groups of children would go out with their teachers into Wellington City and have an adventure while learning. Kids just love getting out of the classroom and with the ideas of using a story for them to be directly involved with would make for a fun and exciting day.

Also by having a younger target audience, the creative possibilities of the game/story is so much more. We believe it is better to teach the younger generation about these environmental issues as they are more susceptible to it and get them preparing for the future.

Story/Narrative

Talk about the game and more about how it will unfold, characters etc

The story that we are putting to this location based game will be based around the idea of good vs evil. A lot of games these days give the user “choice” we want to give our users the same option, by letting the users chose between good and evil it will draw them into the story more and make them feel in control.
 From the very start of the game the groups will have a choice, wether they want to help the city or destroy it. Each group will be contacted at the start by both leading characters (good character and the evil character) which will then leave it up to them on which path to take. This will then take them out into the city completing missions and being faced with more decisions to determine their final outcome.

During the game the groups will be sent out onto public transport as a way of getting to each location (i.e. Using the Cable Cart to get to the botanical gardens) or they will be on foot. Each mode of transport will have different points assigned with them. At each location their will be something for them to solve so that they can move out to the next location. The locations we chose will be places around Wellington that show contrast between clean green reserved areas and industrial polluted areas so that the children can visually see and experience them.

We have been having a lot of discussion about the characters that the users will be interacting with. The groups will be contacted by the each character throughout the entire game depending on what path they take. We want to kids to get to know about each character and what they represent (good – Carbon Neutral and environment friendly. Bad – polluting and wasteful) through the use of video, audio and text. By having a lot of videos and audio in the game it will be a more entraining learning experience. We are also still deciding wether to use animated characters or real life.

Our initial ideas of how the story will unfold is still in it’s early stages and with more in-depth research and discussion we will piece the story together.

Carbon Neutral / Transport

One of our main goals is to educate the user about the benefits of using public transport as a means of getting around the Wellington region. At the same time we want them to become aware of how carbon emissions are effecting the environment and if we don’t start working on it now it’s only going to get worse. By putting all these educational facts into a game/story we hope to achieve an educational, fun, adventurous gaming experience.

Technical Issues

We have started thinking about what sort of technical issues that we are going to face and what sort of software and additions to the iPaq that we are going to require. By looking on the Mscapsers website we have already found some applications that relate to our ideas.
For example, as the students are going to be in groups and not everyone will be able to hold the iPaq at all times we are looking at a way that the group can enjoy the game as a whole. As we will be using a lot of video and audio to tell the story and assign missions it is important that at least everyone hears the audio so we were looking at this gadget called “x-mini capsule speaker” or something similar so that everyone can enjoy the audio and be move involved in the story.

HYPERLINK

Character Appearance

atdesign121 — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 08:08:11 +0000

Initial Game Design & Idea

atdesign121 — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 05:19:31 +0000

Character Appearance Idea

Users snap shot photo from the iPaq camera
Custom appearance build by the user (e.g. Seond Life)