Evander Batson
xinhe feng
FluffyLeecy
frankiezek
gaboratparsons
giang063
gracegotlost
lauriewaxman
Siwen Li
Tim Xiaofeng Lin
Yury Gitman
mar28th
Max(TONG WEN)
Soohyun
sabotai
Susan Lin
Prior Art and Orderred Parts
Reactable:
This project is just amazing and makes great use of physical object t control sound.
Scrapple:
Another, more intuitive/easy to use sequencer that uses physical objects as parameters for the sound.
Balls for iPhone:
Obviously not the interaction I’m looking for, but the sound is really great.
Also, over the weekend, I was able to speak with Tracy Gromek, who created smart balls as part of her thesis project. She used IR sensors as a way of determining the balls location, so I suspect I will do the same as it seems to be an effective and inexpensive way of accomplishing that goal. She agreed to show me her work, which should prove extremely valuable in developing my project.
And on that note, I placed an order with Spark Fun for the IR LEDs and a few types of IR receivers as well as gyroscopes, accelerometers and a few other gadgets so I can test out the different sorst of data I can get form the balls. Also coming to my apartment via Amazon are varied types of foam and styrofoam balls to start playing with.
Once everything arrives I want to build some balls and see what kind of info I get from the various sensors since that may well shape what kind of feedback I want to use to generate the sounds.
Making Toys 
andywallace 11:57 pm on April 4, 2011 Permalink |
This post does not include, but really ought to, a bit of strategy I got from Tracy Gromek when I spoke to her in term sof the IR sensors. The way she recommended doing it was to have each ball outfitted with several IR leds and several IR receivers in order to get the distance from each ball.
Other useful information from today’s critique:
I was concerned that the use of a laptop as a base station may make the project less mobile. Yury likes the idea of having the balls generate sound on their own, but this would require much simpler sounds. For the sake of rich sounds I’m fairly certain that I’ll be using the laptop. Especially since it will also allow me to get more information from each ball.
One of the important bits of information I could access by doing that is having each ball know what kind of ball it is, which could allow for much deeper interaction between the balls if they have different sonic behaviors.
Scott mentioned how easy it is to get things communicating using MIDI. Right now I’m using OSC, which is certainly robust, but MIDI definitely deserves to at least be looked into since it is so universal.
Lief is aware of a hack to get the Xbee to connect directly to the iphone. This would allow an iphone to act as a base station instead of a large laptop. That would be great, but may be outside of the scope of this project. Certainly a good thing to keep in mind if I continue on this project.
The conscious on my sensors seems to be that IR leds are the way to go, and that while gyroscope and accelerometer could be cool, they might not be necessary. A few $1 tilt sensors may do just as good a job (although Thom mentioned that centrifugal force may mess up the tilt sensors). Getting the cost down would be great for making more balls in the future, and these are supplies I could go out and buy in the next days.