Week7 - (O.o) Reflection

Well after an unexpected technical error, our presentation was delayed to this week. Sometimes you just can't predict what will happen.

Overall I was pleased with the way things turned out. I really couldn't have asked for more seeing as our team had very limited experience with Max coding.

The main idea's were there and I was impressed by the new way of thinking we discovered.

What I mean by this is that, we tried to think of ways that we could use the natural motion of the body to produce output mapped to the movement, rather than trying to conform the body to use an 'interface' or perhaps use buttons to control the output.

Quite a few of our pieces of code just didn't seem to want to integrate properly and while frustrating, it was a good learning experience of how the workflow of a project should go.

I think that the one limiting factor was my coding and it had a direct impact on how well we could port our ideas into reality.

I definitely would like to improve on my coding for the next project.

Week6- Growing the Flowers

We continued working on the project and further solidified the idea. We decided to begin piecing it all together, so the flower renders had to be made. I used Adobe After Effects to accomplish this and the results can be seen below.

This is one of the flowers, and then the second..

Once the renders were done, we decided to start working on the powerpoint and how we were going to present.


The criteria we had to touch base with was very clear, and we wanted to make sure to mention every point on the criteria list.

An important thing to note, is that as we went through the criteria, it got us thinking about different aspects of the project and we realized that we hadn't even thought of some things.

One such thing was the need to discuss the idea of embodiment within our project. We knew we had to have motion in our project, but we hadn't thought of how exactly we'd explain our project in terms of embodiment.

An important thing to note is that embodiment can be seen in many different forms.


Shown above is the embodiment of Mazda Motor Corporation's design philosophy "Zoom zoom"

Week5- Project Underway

We decided to pursue an interactive installation that would have the concepts of growing flowers as your body moved. The plan was to use color tracking to track the motion of the body part, in this case a hand, and then render out movies so that Max would call on them and play the movie to display the flower.

The main issue we foresee is that our group's way of thinking is just to use another button interface, meaning we're trying to convert the body into just being another button input. This was actually the wrong way of thinking about it.

After speaking with Greg we understood that instead we must try to utilize motion to get the desired output and steer away from the 'button' interface idea we've become accustomed to in our daily lives.


Just like this toaster, we had to steer clear of buttons :)

The coding for this seems to be a bit challenging. We learned how to work with movie files in class but for some reason the whole workflow of Max is a bit confusing to me. I guess I've never been much of a programmer. Even as a small child.

Week4- The Eye

“Unlike the human eye and brain, no computer vision algorithm is completely "general", which is to say, able to perform its intended function given any possible video input”

 This week's lecture built was very technical and built upon the conceptual ideas in the readings.
The different positionings that were possible with the projectors were interesting because I had never thought about all the work that went into the actually physical set up of the examples we had seen.


What I found useful was that the readings actually related to the lecture material which helped me solidify my understanding of the concepts.


The author went through the different limitations of a computer system’s ‘vision’ and discussed how it’s still a major problem even today. It gave a good base of chronological advancement to show that it’s a hot topic even till this day.

Particularily interesting, was the explanation of how motion tracking actually worked.

The use of specific points on the screen usually given by pixels, are used to track the motion of the body that you choose to follow.


It was interesting to read about the different ways in which the human body can be tracked.“The mouth cavity is easily segmentable as a dark region, and the circularity of its shape is also closely linked to vowel sound. The pupils of the eye emit an easy-to-track infrared retroreflection, and they also indicate a person's direction of gaze.”

   

This also gave me ideas for the project, and how I might be able to track motion.

Week 3- I think therefore I am

"The very act of doubting one's own existence serves as proof of the reality of one's own existence."

The lecture was very deep and talked about how do we even know we exist.
The idea that our existence is proved only by experiencing was something i had never thought about before.

The second main idea brought up was Phenomenology.

The body is our primary instrument for understanding. *An important note was that the unreflected experience comes first and then the reflection occurs within our mind. This reflection can actually change the experience.

The question of the internet came up as well. Will we become less human or super human due to our increased exposure to the cyber world?

Week2- The beginning

Week 1 was my first taste of what body interface really was.

It was the first time I had seen examples motion used to graph out a result. It was very cause-and-effects type of stuff. The examples shown in lecture really caught my eye, especially Funky Forest. I found it particularly amazing how the children could direct water flow through the environment with their bodies.

 "Funky forest is an interactive ecosystem where children create trees with their body and then divert the water flowing from the waterfall to the trees to keep them alive. The health of the trees contributes to the overall health of the forest and the types of creatures that inhabit it."

 Overall the first week was for me a taste of what was to come, and showed me what was possible to be done.


A catalyst for what's to come.