Emo-Capsule

EmoCapsule.com is off to SIGGRAPH

Jordan — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:39:39 +0000

It has been a long while since we have posted anything on out blog so here is an exciting update!An update on Emocapsule.com, with great news our group has been ACCEPTED to take part in SIGGRAPH 2008 being hosted in LA. We will be presenting the week of August 11 - 15 at Los Angeles Convention Centre. This is big news, for those unaware as to what SIGGRAPH (short for Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques) is a Internation Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactivity Techniques which is being hosted at the LA Convention Center during August 11 - 15 2008. In 2005 25 000 people attended the conference, this is something to be pumped about being accepted to.

EmoCapsule is a study of interactivity. Participants influence the installation by inputting their emotions at emocapsule.com. The website provides users with emotional statistics and trends based on frequency, location, and weather information collected. The installation is dynamically updated to reflect the dominant emotional mood.

Visitors interact with the current emotional state of the EmoCapsule installation - depicted through sound, text, and colour. Participants move and catch emotion words using their own silhouette and other objects. Participants make loud noises, triggering the installation to emit reactive sounds and display new words. These form a sort of conversation between the user and the installation space.

So if you will please check out Emocapsule.com and or the SIGGRAPH website. With Love JSHAW and the EmoCapsule Team

Picking Colors for Emotions

Alicia — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 01:47:40 +0000

So needless to say this whole selecting a color to represent an emotion turned out to be harder than I anticipated.

So I updated the Style Guide and posted it on the change control system. I have a folder of fonts and I am not quite sure what to do with them. I will try and create a demo page that people can look over so we can select some that seem to meet our requirements.

In the meantime I would appreciate it if everyone could take a look at the style guide on the change control, look at the color swatches and give me some sort of comments.

Thanks

And, if you are interested in trying your hand at it , heres the site I found, its loads of fun.

http://kuler.adobe.com/#

Just go to “create” on the left-hand side.

Installation Layout

Alicia — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 12:31:45 +0000

I totally just realized that this is the one thing that it never occurred to me to update…. and I have no idea why.

So anyways, getting down to business. We have a bunch of potential layouts created that will probally need to be updated or altered based on what we decide to do in the end. So for now I will just post the images.

Processing it up

Eric — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 06:43:54 +0000

Hey guys, for the past day or two I’ve been hacking away at Processing…the more I’m using this the more I’m loving it. Amazon was very quick. I got the Processing text book the very next day I ordered it!

I have been looking into Sound stuff and have found some awsome libaries that we can definitly leverage for our proj. Check out this URL: http://sonia.pitaru.com/
Taken from the site: “The Sonia Library provides advanced audio capabilities such as multiple sample playback, realtime sound synthesis, realtime FFT (frequency) analysis of the microphone input, and writing .wav files from samples.”

I’ve already got some visual output based on lineIn or mic inputs sounds.

I’ve been also studying the book and played around with some tutorials…check out this screen shot that I made. Basically it is animated and rotates around in 3D… pretty bleh but a start hehe.

Rear Projection for Misers Part 2.

Hannah — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 01:55:35 +0000

Plastic dollar-bin ($1) white table cloth, unaltered, 137 cm x 274 cm (BIG):

(The quality of the photo doesn’t do it justice)

Easy to hang, most likely sewable, light-weight, transportable, no ironing required!

(I’m going to go back and buy at least 10… maybe 20, how big do we want this thing?)

Multiwall Installation

Eric — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 00:06:25 +0000

Hey guys thought you might find this interesting:

http://vimeo.com/282083

Technical Difficulties

Hannah — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 15:55:34 +0000

From what I can tell (and what we’ve discussed), one of the bigger technical challenges that I think we will face will keeping track of where each user is within the space. Assigning emotions to an id in a database is fairly straight-forward, as is projecting emotion rings around a person from above. But I think knowing which person belongs to that id (so as to project the correct emotions around the correct person) might be tricky.

Some ideas for possible solutions: Colour tracking or some other video-based tracking (probably our best bet, would likely require more cameras to view from the side, and might affect how we choose to handle lighting within the installation), Give users something to help us track them (something with a specific colour, rfid, sound..).

That’s pretty much all I’ve got, but hopefully one of you will have a better idea. Please post anything you think of.

PS. My arduino board arrived and I made an LED blink.

Messy sketches

Hannah — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 23:38:45 +0000

I was talking to Eric about the limitations of accelerometers — we’d only be able to use a few suits. This would severely limit the fun of the installation. One possible solution I thought about was to divide the installation into phases. In the first phase, users would be given instruction to put on the accelerometers and go in. They would see various poses displayed on the screen to represent emotions. They would mimic said emotions and acquire the emotion-rings as seen in Eric’s sketch. Once they’d had their fun and acquired many rings, they would take off the suit and leave - sort of. They would go out the exit door and through some kind of hallway (I had visions of dark hallways with graffiti-style light following the user as he/she went through (through the use of another web cam or arduino sensors - which could also light up some floor panels or something cool like that). Then bam! the user enters a whole other installation.. they still have their emotion rings (somehow.. this we’d have to sort out). On the wall, since we probably wouldn’t have to show the emotion poses, we could instead display the whole web-inputted network of emotion compatibilities. It would be cool if people could visit the site, upload a photo of themselves and choose their emotions - then the circle would be generated and interact with other people’s representations (much the same way as the live-installation ones do on the floor.

I sketched it up very roughly as I was thinking it through so it might not be that clear, but I’m including it anyway. Ask me any questions.

Obviously it’s just one of many possible solutions so feel free to tear it apart or suggest other directions!

Touch Screen Interactive

Eric — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 21:07:44 +0000

Not sure if you guys checked it out but yea this is pretty sweet. I don’t think its new but good for ref: touch screen

And another thing..

Hannah — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 19:01:56 +0000

We could incorporate a web component (and perhaps another component to the installation) by allowing users to define the compatibilities. So users can decide whether happy belongs with sad, or sad belongs with confused. If that makes sense?