Danny Rozin's "mirror" projects

Even though his projects do not permit users to engage via touch (because the mechanisms are too fragile), Danny Rozin's project are relevant to our exploration. Take a look at the wooden mirror project:

Toy Symphony

This video includes a number of very interesting haptic musical interfaces. the beat bugs are of particular relevance to our topic. They permit a gestural language to be spontaneously executed and learned, in which collabotative acoustical effects are created by manipulating hand-held objects and moving them through space. this appears to be mostly a proprioceptive interface: it doesn't appear to present information via tactile perception.

Evan Grant: Making sound visible through cymatics

A video from TED talks.
I thought this was a really interesting subject; giving sound a form.
What if the touch of the user creates its own image as feedback, if that makes any sense

Simple example of a touch-sensitive model

Here's a photo of an interactive touchable topographical model. It was made by Rauda Scale Models in Seattle. The model is located at the Great Falls Tavern Visitor Center in Potomac, Md. I went down on Sept. 4 to install a touch sensor device on the model. It only has three channels, and is very basic. They are evalutating the idea in case the Park Service wants to add these kind of displays at other sites.

From installation

The model is fiberglass. The fabricator cast it, then masked out the three zones, and sprayed the whole things with touchp-sensitive coating. then he removed the masking tape, and top coated the model with another layer of regular paint, and then a clear coat for protection. A wire runs from the touchSensor device to each zone from the underside of the casting. There's an application running on a PC inside the cabinet, and a speaker overhead. As parts of the model are touched, descriptive text is spoken.

There's a very simple set up GUI that lets the curators modify that text that the exhibit delivers. You can see that at the end of this video.

Posting pictures to the blog

Of course, it's very easy to add images to posts. Images can be uploaded from you hard drive, like in the example below. You can also place an image in a post from using an Internet URL. To do this, click on the photo icon in the post editor, and fill in either the URL where the picture can be found on the Internet, or click the browse button to find the picture file on your computer. Here's an example of picture that I found on line:

User accounts

This blog is an important part of the work of this elective, and I am expecting everyone to post to it frequently and also to respond to what you see here. This produces a very useful record of our activities this semester. I would like everyone to jump in and learn what you need to know to get the most benefit from this resource. I have posted a bunch of instructional messages dealing that you may find helpful. Please take a look at these.

To use the blog, you do not need a Gmail account, although it is a very useful thing to have, and will give you access to many of Google's amazing free online tools and cloud computing capabilities. You can easilty link your newschool.edu email to the Gmail one. To do this: go to www.gmail.com, and if you do not have a gmail account, click on "Create New Account". Once you have set up the account, link to your newschool.edu account by going to Settings, then click on "Accounts and Import". Where it says, "Check mail using POP3, click on the button labeled, "Add POP3 email account". Then, enter your "yourname@newschool.edu", and click "Next Step". You then need to enter your newschool.edu password. That's it. If you want messages that you send from your gmail account to look like they come from your newschool account, you can do that by clicking on "Send mail as" under "Settings".

Posting videos to the blog

Adding videos to the blog is a very good thing to do. I know of three ways to add videos to postings on blogger:

Method 1 (best way): navigate to the YouTube or other video you want to add to your post. Find the "embed" box, hilite the text there and copy it to your clipboard. Then, go to your post editor, click on the "Edit Html" tab, and paste what you copied from the embed box in the position where you want the video to appear. Here's an exampe:

Method 2 (good way): Click on the video icon in the post editor, then browse for a video file on your computer, then click Upload. This only works if the video does not exceed Blogger's size limit.

Method 3 (not that good): Enter the name of the video in the post editor, highlight that, then click on the Link icon (looks like a little chain), and enter the URL for a YouTube or other web-hosted video. This will take the blog reader to the other website, with no guarantee they he will click back once he is finished looking at the video.

Multisensory mapping: Manhattan smells

I was talking with PJ Carlino the other day about the themes of this course. He mentioned that he is an avid cyclist, and he has developed the habit of thinking about places in terms of their elevation is relation to his current position. Most people imagine a flat map of the place they are thinking about, but in PJ's mind, this mental map has height, too, because that information is relevant when you are planning a bike trip. This is an example of multi-sensory perception, because he is mentally combining his knowledge of the horizontal position of places (their x,y coordinates) based on familiarity with flat maps, with his memories of having to work harder to propel his bicycle up hills. Along the same lines, I saw a funny cartoon in the New York Times earlier this week. A guy had created a map of Manhattan, and then traveled all over to document the different smells he observed in various neighborhoods. You can check out an interactive version of his map and the description of smells he encountered here.

From Screen Captures

Welcome to the Tactile Innovation Workshop Blog

This is Steven Landau, instructor of the elective class, Tactile Innovation Workshop, at Parsons The New School for Design Product Design Department. This blog will provide a forum for observations and commentary from me and the class participants. To see the class website, click here.