Tangible User Interfaces - Fall 2011

Name: Hilfi Alkaff, Victor Tjhia, Albert Tjoeng

Title: Tube Blower

 

Project Proposoal: Tube Blower

 

Tube Blower is a device that invites gamers to play in a completely unprecedented form of interactions. Instead of traditional devices such as keyboards, mouse, joysticks and wii remote controls that challenges gamers on how swift and fluent their fingers are, tube blower challenges gamers to play games using a tube that they will control with their mouth.

 

Target User Group

 

Everybody who play games.

 

Interactive Design

 

The tube will be implemented by attaching a force sensor in one end of the tube (in which the user will blow from the other end), which will determine how strong they blow. Orientations, movements and accelerations of the tube will be detected using 3 axis accelerometer and 2 axis gyroscopes. The data will be fed in to the computer using arduino and the games will be most likely designed using Processing. The design of the games will revolve around these basic user actions. This system may seem to present a very limited form of user interactions but myriads of mini-games could be written based on these user actions alone. An instance of a very popular game (that consists of numberous mini-games) from the past that could be ported and adapted to these user actions is bishi bashi (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-azMAkQeAgg) although due to time constraints, we don't think that we will be able to finish porting such games.

 

Related Works

 

BLUI (http://abstract.cs.washington.edu/~shwetak/papers/uist07_blui.pdf) : Low Cost Localized Blowable User Interface by Shwetak N. Patel and Gregory D. Abowd from School of Interactive Computing & GVU Center, Georgia Institute of Technology is “a unique form of hands-free interaction that can be implemented on most commodity computing platforms.” BLUI supports blowing computer screen to control certain application. The main difference between BLUI and our Tube Blower is while BLUI support direct blowing to the screen, we will control it using a tube to create a more concrete form of interactions between the users and the system.