Assignment: Final Project 1: Progress Report 

Collaborators: Becky Hurwitz, Connor Riley

Design Decisions

We will continue designing the gear toy.  Our main goal is to give people a way to have fun making music with gears.  Collaboration and education are secondary goals.  We have been discussing ways to make the interaction more intuitive and inventive for the end users.  Rather than hardcoding and thus limiting the music and sounds on the gears to ones we choose, we are exploring the idea of allowing sounds/music/words/anything auditory to be recorded directly onto the gears and played back when the gears are turned.  We will add a microphone and speaker to each gear, as well as a mechanism (Arduino board?) for sending sound files to and from the computer.  We believe that this type of interaction would be more fun for people, as they can be very creative with what they record and how they link the gears to be played back, while still allowing for our original model of adding beautiful sound files to the gears.  We encourage users to interpret the aesthetics of the gears themselves to inspire the types of sounds they add to the gears: for some of us, the translucent, gel-like nature of the Oligears reminds us of water droplets, or the ocean.

A couple of details: It makes sense for the same sound to be played back, regardless of which direction the gear is turning; otherwise the sound would be noisy and nonsensical.  We are considering three possible dimensions: the speed of rotation, the size of the gear, and the color of the gear.  We may choose to map larger gears to modulating sounds to be lower frequency, and smaller gears to modulating sounds to be higher frequency.  We are undecided on color: if the color does not matter, we may need to spray paint the gears so that they are all one color, so that users are not confused by the discrepancy.  The speed of rotation will directly map to how quickly or slowly the sound is played back.  To remove magnetic interference, we will be removing the magnets from the Oligears.

We are excited about the opportunity to design the recording mechanism to be tangibly pleasurable and intuitive - something more than a button.  Perhaps three force sensors to start recording, or a palming motion.  As an alternative, we are intrigued by the idea of using a gear as a recording gear. Stacking a gear on top of this gear would put the gear in recording mode and commence recording.  Removing the gear from the recording gear would stop recording.

We will start with one gear, adding recording and playback capability to it, and then add more gears.  We anticipate the interaction with multiple gears to be follow the natural properties of gears.  A large gear connected to a small gear will result in the small gear rotating more times and playing back sound faster.  Two gears moving in conjunction will result in music/sounds being overlayed on top of each other.  People can still collaborate by recording, linking, and playing back gears in the same physical space.

Existing Research/Work

We have found much work in the area of tangible user interfaces for the manipulation of sounds.

We are interested in tools that include some or many of the following elements of our tool:

There are a few TUIs created as tools for DJs.  These tools are mostly intended for a single user and rely on the user's knowledge of DJ tools to achieve music playback.  Most of these are essentially turntables that are augmented to allow a DJ to use the table as the interface for choosing tracks from her library as well as to affect the way those tracks are played.  An example of this kind of tool is Timbap (http://www.timbap.de/dj/).

Another class of TUIs for sound manipulation that we have found translate non-audio information into audio.  An example of this kind of tool is Brick (http://bricktable.wordpress.com/).  With Brick, a user can place a tangible object on a dedicated surface onto which digital information has been projected.  The system plays a sound and alters it depending on the information represented in that area on the dedicated surface.  In the example on the site, the bricks can be placed on a weather map of the United States.  When a brick is placed on a cold area, the sound plays a certain way, and when placed on a warm area, the sound plays a different way.  This tool can be used collaboratively or individually.

Reactable: http://reactable.iua.upf.edu/

Etiquette: http://etiquette.surfacepressure.net/

Timbap: http://www.timbap.de/dj/

Brick: http://bricktable.wordpress.com/

As users will be able to record their own sounds, we are also interested in reviewing work in TUIs for recording and playback.  This will help us to understand best practices in recording audio and the range of sounds we could manipulate and will also help us to make sure that we are creating new research.

List of materials

Oligears (1 or 2 sets of 11)

RFID tags, one for each gear

Microphones, one for each gear

Speakers, one for each gear

Pillboxes, or other suitable plastic box base, one for each gear

Batteries or USB packs

360-degree potentiometers for sensing speed, one for each gear

Arduino boards, one for each gear (possibly)

Putty or some other material for replacing the magnets