by: Taylor, Amit, and myself

Otar is fun. Otar likes to tell stories. Otar likes to share.

Plug and Squeeze. Otar speaks through your computer’s USB port to a desktop widget that communicates with Facebook. With every squeeze, Otar’s stories come to life. To build stories of your own, you can pick images from Otar’s stories, caption them and send them to your friends.

A simple, easy to use system, Otar uses the body to drive communication through storytelling. Regardless of age, language, culture and literacy level, you can play with Otar.

Please read more on Taylor’s blog.

To use Otar, you must download and run the desktop widget.

Step 1 – Log in to Otar and let the squeezing begin.

Step 2 – Squeeze Otar to find the right image.

Step 3 – Pick a friend, caption your image, and then have Otar send it off.

Hopefully, your friend will already have the Otar Facebook application installed. If not, she may add it with a few simple clicks. Then, she will be able to review the Otar conversation you two have started.

More documentation

A more thorough description of our process can be found here.

For those trying to implement serial communication in Java through Eclipse, the archive below should be of great use. Make sure to add the native binaries to your library folder so that everything runs smoothly. The SerialInterface class provides a clean way to get to everything working. Serial Files

]]> http://www.blog.alexabreu.com/2007/12/13/i-am-otar-by-taylor-amit-and-myself/feed/ 0 http://www.blog.alexabreu.com/2007/12/13/currently-on-webkinzcom/ http://www.blog.alexabreu.com/2007/12/13/currently-on-webkinzcom/#comments Thu, 13 Dec 2007 20:05:38 +0000 alex.abreu http://www.itp.alexabreu.com/?p=41 The NYT just published an article about the latest scheme from the Webkinz team on how to capitalize on virtual play time. Much like, Club Penguin, Webkinz is an online community for children filled to the brim with all sorts of online games and virtual world goodies. Unlike most other social networks, Webkinz requires users to buy a plush doll in order to gain access to the site. Unfortunately, the toy is nothing more than a way to bundle in an access code to the site, providing no added value in the form of play time away from the virtual world. Yet, forcing parents to buy these expensive ($15 and up) dolls wasn’t quite enough for the company, and they are now supplementing revenues by forcing children to watch ads on the site after logging in. They have also tied in the ad content into the online world, allowing children to purchase ad-related accessories for their characters. When I first heard about Webkinz earlier this semester, I thought they were probably on to something with their attempt to combine virtual and physical play time. The NYT article highlights just how unoriginal their idea has now become. Rather than focusing on the potential for interplay between physical objects and online play, the Webkinz team has reverted back to the most primitive form of online marketing; proving that they are not a toy company and much more like the typical ‘have no new ideas on how to make money on the internet’ spam site.

Dr. Paul Pangaro emphasizes that their is indeed a difference between interactivity and reactivity. More importantly, it is increasingly important to understand and highlight the differences between the two.  Pangaro, a cybernetisist, describes the language for analyzing how things interact. He uses illustration to great effect in demonstrating the looping nature of interaction. This looping behavior determines the on-going dynamics of a reciprocal interaction. Interaction requires the flexibility for changing inputs and outputs. A set of pre-determined outputs that do not change according to corresponding changes in input behavior cannot count as interaction.

Architectural Digest recently republished an article highlighting how language can be abused in design. Labeling everything interactive, for example, undermines a deeper understanding of the varying degrees of interactivity.  By limiting our ability to compare and discuss design, we hinder our ability to innovate in the spaces exposed by our comparisons.  Therefore,  as designers it is important to analyze both purpose and result in terms which express meaningful information about the design in question.

Yet, just as artistic tastes change, so do our understandings of mathematical problems. The beauty of crafted objects is that they avoid pretension and elitism. Crafted objects can be adorned, but can also serve a very distinct purpose. They take on a personality and share stories. Even after they are no longer useful as intended, they may hold a special sentimental value. Craftsmen have no public to please. They build for themselves in the style of those who came before them. Through this generational passing on of tradition, the crafted object earns a history which outlives the trends of art and minimal design.

As a en engineer and designer, I have to fight the urge to make an object too precise and too perfect. After all, what I truly want to create are objects which can be used and appreciated on a very human level. I think the key to that may very well be incorporating the concepts of craftsmanship into my work. On a very fundamental level, I just don’t think character and charm can be replaced by accuracy and functionality.

Shoes that change color when you reach your target intensity zone. More change means more activity and more intensity!

There is no denying that shoe culture is bigger and better than ever. The big basketball shoe is definitely back for the attack. The Nike Air Force One collection is worn by rappers and hipsters alike, and having one pair just doesn’t do the trick. The louder/crazier the color scheme, the better. Of course, the problem with this sort of consumerism is the tremendous waste created by people owning pairs upon pairs of kicks. This got me thinking about creating a single shoe which could take on different color schemes based upon your current aesthetic preference. Why not have a a shoe which can go from business to party and back again? In certain ways, this has been attempted before through the LA Lights collection, and it is still somewhat popular among young children. The problem with LEDs as the mechanism for change is the loss of the traditional look and feel of a sneaker. LEDs are still too space-agey for shoes and cannot replace textiles and fabrics in the construction of a classic kick. While brainstorming, I began to think about about wearable products which have incorporated color change successfully while maintaining the look and feel of the intended garment. The first thing that came to mind was the Hypercolor t-shirt craze of the late 1980s. Despite the unfortunate side effect of accentuating sweat stains and the like, the Hypercolor t-shirt was adopted for its fun chameleon-like qualities. With that thought, I resolved to create a product which would have a similar captivating quality with a greater sense of control in order to limit undesired results. I’ve always had something of a shoe fetish and was interested in applying my concept to a an article of clothing which I believe says a lot about a person’s character and interests. And so, Kromicks were born.

The next step in my process was identifying how I wanted to use thermochromic pigment (dye used in Hypercolor t-shirts) in an expressive manner while also maintaining a sense of control over the color change. At first, I thought of simply allowing a user to control a simple switch or knob to toggle the color change functionality. For instance, if a user wanted to make his/her shoes change from black to red, he/she would flip a switch to get the desired effect. Although, I still believe such functionality would eventually be a nice feature, I didn’t believe such a simple reactive experience was enough. Through conversations with my teammate Seung Ran Woo, we converged on accentuating the original purpose of a sneaker. As designed, sneakers are intended for athletic activity. We believe a sneaker which highlights this athletic activity and movement will encourage the wearer as well as excite the spectators at the big game. I imagine the shoes as a physical representation of physical energy much like the ‘he’s on fire’ game play made famous in the classic NBA Jams video game. Imagine a middle school basketball player running up and down the courts at the championship game. Both he and the crowd know he’s giving it all he’s got because his shoes are glowing with intensity, and outshining all the other players on the court. Motivating, inspiring, and most of all fun.

Larger Version

Materials

Piezo – a simple sensor to track footsteps

LilyPad – a beautiful form factor of the Arduino to process footsteps

Small Electric Heater – to slightly warm the thermochromic paint to the necessary temperature

Proto Board – to manage power and take inputs from the sensor

Thermochromic Paint – painted on the Nike Swoosh to change color when high enough intensity levels are met

Air Force One’s – for a little style.

Images:

Protototypes

Images:

Video:

Construction

Images:

The Real Thing

Images:

Lisa Guernsey’s novel highlights current research in the arena of young children’s television viewing. Much of the research is interesting, and can provide a parent with some insight into how to approach television with their child. Lisa emphasizes that moderation is the most important factor when children are allowed to spend time in front of the television, and that by no means is it a replacement for good parenting.

Unfortunately, Lisa interprets much of the research as justification to place a child in front of the television occasionally as a way to find respite from the rigors of child rearing. She forgets to answer the question ‘what is the benefit of placing a child in front of the television at all?’ Recounting research that indicates moderate viewing of age appropriate television might not be harmful to a child does little to get to the real issue–is television worth a child’s time?

Guernsey states that the wrong kinds of television (age inappropriate, background noise heavy, scary, violent, etc.) definitely do interrupt children’s natural play patterns. That being the case, why take the chance at all? Most often the studies Guernsey recounts indicate that interaction and play time are the most important things to early child development. Why risk affecting the pillars of child development? Television is not an obviously productive medium. Why introduce a mediocre tool into a child’s life at all. I believe Guernsey’s answers to these questions to be a form of justification for continuing to let her daughters watch television. In the process she has indicated that some television might not be so bad for other people’s kids. Is ‘not so bad’ really good enough?

I found the research indicating that children’s abilities with language are severely derailed by background television noise horribly alarming. Looking back on my sister’s early development, I can see how this had terrible consequences for her. She watched way too much television as a child–mainly because my parents were much busier when she came around. As a toddler she had the hardest time with language and has always had a slight difficulty hearing the way she should be able to. My parents let her regulate her own television viewing time, and that was probably not to her advantage. Guernsey’s reporting of this study is quite meaningful for society, but if this research proves to be true over time, why run the risk of doing harm to a child by placing them in front of a television at all? Guernsey does not spend enough time on this point, and I think a book with the best interests of a child in mind would do more to explore this very concept.

Television, more than anything else, is a passive medium. It provides for peaks and dips in children’s attention and cannot be compared to uninterrupted play time. In my opinion, the smartest thing to do is keep your kids far away from television. There are definitely no studies in existence which indicate doing so will have a negative consequence on their development. The reverse is definitely false.

Sensorimotor (ages 0 – 2 1/2) children become absorbed with every new object they discover. They experience these objects through touch often gumming or chewing to better understand them. Their view of the world is very focused and narrow–often compared to seeing the world in the cone of a flashlight’s projection.

Pre-operational children (ages 2 1/2 – 7) begin to understand the way the objects they come in contact with fit within the world. They can connect linear memories with one another to establish rules for play. Through play they identify new relationships, but tend to be quite ego-centric when interacting with other people. Pre-operational children have a difficult time understanding the more abstract properties of objects such as mass and volume.

The video below shows these two stages of learning. Watch the young tactile children as they experience the world through touch. Watch them become instantly absorbed with whatever they find along the way. The second half of the video shows slightly older children engaging in more complicated forms of play. They play pretend, communicate freely with other children, understand toys as tools and live within their own spotlights.

The video below shows the inability of pre-operational children to distinguish size from the more qualitative properties of an object. They can be easily fooled by simply modifying the way a problem is presented.

Concrete-operational (ages 7 – 12) children have a greater ability to think abstractly. They can make connections between many memories in a non-linear way. They continue to form more complex relationships with the outside world. To highlight the differences between the pre-operational and concrete-operational I’ve juxtaposed two videos of different aged children playing guitar. The important thing to note is not the skill level but the equal sense of immersion and enjoyment despite the different understandings of the tool in hand.

The video below shows that concrete operational children have a a much greater ability to follow rules of deduction.

Finally, formal-operational children (ages 12 and up) have a firm grasp of abstract logic and begin to test their theories out in the world. They push the boundaries of their environments to reaffirm their theories. They are interested in understanding their identity in the world. Simply put, they are teenagers figuring out how they fit into the world. The video below highlights formal-operational children discussing an abstract theory and how it relates to their own existence within the world.

Advice to not fight the prevailing wind, but to bend with it. Collaboration is flexibility, and our survival depends on our ability to internalize this rapidly approaching form of innovation and exchange.

Somewhere along the way, our trusty team began to discuss the land line phone system and its incredible tentacle like span. Rory had previously done a project with phones and we all seemed interested in exploring that technology from a new perspective. We started to play around with phone network ideas, and resolved to build our own party line. We then faced the challenge of obtaining an adequate number of phones and lines to reach our objective. We turned to our favorite network for help.

We sent out a message to the ITP student e-mail list asking if other students had any phones laying around for our project. A day later we’d received a few messages and along the way uncovered a smaller network of retro phone technology collectors among the ITP community. Our friend Alice actually had a working party line she let us borrow in exchange for a phone and more stable power connector. Great deal. Yet, our team had envisioned having to figure out how to hack the party line, and now that work was already done for us.

Now, we had to figure out what the heck we were going to do with our phone system. Needless to say, we spent a lot of time whispering and giggling over the phones, and had a great time playing around with a technology none of us had used in a while (cellphones are cheaper). There was something about the clearness of the sound and intimacy of the large phones that kept us captivated for a good while. If you haven’t done so in a while, pick up a non-cordless land line phone and have a conversation with someone. It’s refreshingly nostalgic.

So what now? We hadn’t really created a phone network, but merely plugged one in. Yet, our network was different from a traditional phone network in a few respects. 1) The phone system worked on a master-slave relationship. Meaning that a primary phone had to be activated in order for the phones to be able to communicate with one another. Picture a prison phone network. The guard has control of the primary phone and can listen in on all the prisoners’ conversations. Our team also wanted to explore the notion of the death of the network.

Four our class demo, we decided to create a simple representation of the way e-mail works using our phone network. Turning back to our favorite network (the student list), we grabbed some short e-mail messages and broke them out into individual words. Caleb, Rory, and I acted as nodes in the network sending our individual messages. We scrambled our speaking order as a way to simulate packet switching on the web. On another phone, at the other end of the network was the packet assembler who had to listen in to reassemble the messages Caleb, Rory, and I were sending. Evrim had control of the primary phone and had instructions to hang up if the packet assembler took too long trying to reassemble the messages.

Through our simulation we sought to emphasize that the network exerts a great deal of control over the users and can determine the results of interaction through it.