Team Colonial:

Dave Lackey (dlackey@)

John O’Neill (jconeill@)

Horia Radoi (hradoi@)

Brainstorming ideas:

1. (Concentration – sketched) Device that looks at what you’re browsing and shocks you / punches you when you procrastinate. Sketch.
2. (Education) Interactive game that allows you to control things virtually that would otherwise be too dangerous (nuclear waste or dangerous chemicals).
3. (Exercise) A game involving lasers that force you to exercise by performing quick foot movements in order to win.
4. (Health) Laptop stand that raises up after a certain amount of time so that you have to stand (relieves back pain). Sketch.
5. (Leisure) Beverage launcher controlled by voice.
6. (Music) Virtual DJ board controlled by hand gestures.
7. (Navigation – sketched) A device that taps your shoulder when you should turn right or left (vehicle or on-foot navigation).  Could possibly integrate with voice navigation. Sketch.
8. (Other) Coding through gestures and voice (in addition to keyboard).
9. (Other) Device that helps you wake up by giving you a challenging set of physical and virtual tasks to turn off its alarm mechanism.
10. (Other) Pads under your sheets that slowly vibrate to wake you up. Sketch.
11. (Robotics – sketched) A robot who crawls across a chalkboard to clean it when activated. Sketch.
12. (Accessibility) Heads Up Display – Attached to your glasses and connected to your phone through bluetooth, displays information about callers, number of unread texts and/or emails. Sketch.
13. (Health) Barcode reader for fridge – lets you know when your food is going bad.
14. (Accessibility) Round touchscreen phone, that can be worn on your forearm.
15. (Entertainment) A walking FURBY® toy, that can follow you around when it is hungry.
16. (Accessibility) Local GPS/Wifi signal generators that can be attached to important devices that are easily misplaced(Phone, Keys, Prox, Backpack) – in order to find them easier.
17. (Accessibility) Turning any display into a touchscreen by using a glove with an emitter attached to the fingers, which transmits a signal whenever it sense pressure (touching a surface), and 4 receivers placed on the corners of the display, which pinpoint the positon of the fingers.
18. (Accessibility) Number 16 for generating 3D points by pressing a button and drawing in mid air (would require computer to see generated image/series of points)
19. (Lifestyle) Travel mug with a heater incorporated, that heats your beverage whenever it gets too cold. Sketch.
20. (Lifestyle) Backpack with a solar panel incorporated, which can recharge you phone or ipod.
21. (Autonomous Vehicle) Cars that park themselves in a designated parking lot.
22. (Autonomous Vehicle) On-campus golf cart taxi service for injured athletes – fleet of self driven golf carts that pick up and drop off injured students in an efficient way.
23. (Lifestyle) Breathalyzer car start – you can’t start your car unless your BAC is in normal limits.
24. (Lifestyle) Roomba/Helicopter that brings you a glass of water when you are in bed (autonomous or pre-programmed).
25. (Lifestyle) Polarized TV programmes – two different programs running on the same device, but on different polarizing streams – you need a pair of glasses to watch your own show.
26. (Lifestyle) Equipment that prepares a set breakfast when you wake up (start when you hit the alarm button on the alarm clock)
27. (Lifestyle) Shampoo estimator – dispense enough shampoo based on the length of your hair
28. (Lifestyle) Automated TShirt folder – give it crumpled Tshirts and it outputs them neatly folded.
29. (Education) Piano assistant – load a music file and it teaches you how to play it on the piano, by lighting up the key you need to press.
30. (Education) Number 29 for guitar – because guitars are cool.
31. (Lifestyle) Device that changes the song on your ipod based on the intensity of your workout (mostly for running) or based on blood pressure. Sketch.
32. (Lifestyle) Device that detects a song you dislike on the radio and replaces it with a song from your ipod (also serves as ipod charger)
33. (Lifestyle) Glasses that light up if alcohol is detected in a drink
34. (Entertainment) Racing game controllable with your steering wheel and car levers, for when you have to wait in the car for long times.
35. (Lifestyle) Radar that detects how far you are from the car in front of you/ Alerts you when it has moved far enough – for stop-and-go traffic
36. (Lifestyle) Camera incorporated in your eyeglasses, that can take an exact picture of what you can see.
37. (Accessibility) Automatic page turner when eyes reach last element on page
38. (Heath) Sensors improper posture, delivers some feedback – vibrations where incorrect.
39. (Health) Use kinect to train user into proper lifting / workout form.
40. (Health) Use kinect to detect if people are stalking you / behind you.
41. (Health) Toothbrush that tells you if you’ve missed any spots
42. (Lifestyle) Helping blind people shop for clothes, or just choose clothes in the morning
43. (Lifestyle) Glasses with facial recognition so you never forget someone’s name, or perhaps those who have trouble recognizing faces, such as those with helps those with Asperger’s
44. (Entertainment) Glasses that read the depth of objects in front of you, and recreates relative depth on a surface that can be felt (like a pinpression) — this way, a blind person could “feel” the objects and space in front of them (e.g. the way performers move left/right and forward/back on a stage)
45. (Music) Using nerf guns as musical inputs (place in space alters note)
46. (Lifestyle) Using myoelectric sensors to help amputees control machines (e.g. something that controls a paintbrush or prepares dinner)
47. (Music) Rockband using flex sensors – someone plays air guitar or air drums, and the sensors on their limbs translate motion into a sound
48. (Lifestyle) Travel mug with an LED that displays how hot a beverage is.
49. (Lifestyle) Stereo cameras for glasses that can approximate distances.
50. (Kinect) TV remote control using gestures.
51. (Kinect) Martial arts/Krav Maga form/posture corrector in real time
52. (Kinect) Light art – Use a Kinect controller to detect the position of a digital spray can, and based on its position, back project a grafitti drawing generated by the user. Sketch.

Idea Choice Explanation

For our project we are going with sensors that detect improper posture.  People who monitor their health and have seating posture issues could benefit from this.  A possible interface could be a simple set mechanism to set a desired posture, and then an alert mechanism to notify the user when they stray from the posture.  To reach this idea, the group members each picked his favorite idea and polled third-parties (students outside of the class) about their favorites.s

Check out our sketch here.

Project Description

Our target group of users are people who sit in chairs, are interested in monitoring their health through the use of technology and who have issues with correct posture and/or back pain.

It’s not too difficult to find out what good seating posture is.  Most people are probably already aware of it.  However, people almost inevitably end up twisting their body frames into unhealthy positions.  If people are aware that they’re straying from good posture, we believe that it will help them to stop straying.  For example, if they are slumping in their chair the product may alert the user about their mistake or penalize them in a virtual way.  This is a product that could be positioned during long periods of sitting.  Another important thing to realize is that they’re often sitting in a chair and in front of a screen, which makes the screen a perfect medium for relaying information about their posture.

One benefit of using flex sensors is that they can easily bend to any bodily contours. A preliminary idea involved creating a chair with properly-placed force sensors, but the arrangement of sensors would have to be reconfigured for each individual using it, unlike the flex sensors, which adapt to the shape of the user.  Additionally, flex sensors can be portable, allowing us to make the product accessible during other areas of life, such as with good weight-lifting posture.

Group members:

David Lackey – dlackey@

John O’Neill – jconeill@

Horia Radoi – hradoi@

(Santhosh Balasubramanian)

Playing Simon Sees

The aim of our project was to create a wearable version of the classic game of Simon Says. As such, the goal of Simon Sees is to remember and duplicate the sequence of lights generated by the microcontroller. The player wears a pair of glasses with two lights, one on each side, which are diffused via straws to create a visible beam of light. The game begins by showing a light sequence of length 1, which the player must duplicate by pressing the corresponding buttons – lighting the straws to indicate his or her decision. After each successful level, an additional light is added to the sequence. When the user makes a mistake, a red LED light notifies the user, and he or she has to restart the game. Overall, we found our final implementation fairly successful, especially after decreasing the time between the lights in the sequence, which increased the amount of attention needed by the player. After spending time with our prototype and inviting additional users to participate, we discovered that future iterations should contain more than two sources of input/ouput and that the current interface for user input (two buttons) could be transformed into something more engaging and unique, such as auditory- or motion-based forms of interaction.

Click here to view our project in action!

Initial Design Sketch

The Simon Sees interface. Note the red light used to notify a user when they make an incorrect move.

Players use the controller to indiciate which light they think is next in the sequence.

Additional Designs

1. Contextual Disco Ball

If our disco ball senses a low-light environment, it begins increasing the brightness of our LED’s (one red, one green, one blue,) which are placed inside of a semitransparent ball. The lights are pulsating, and the frequency at which these lights pulsate is determined by an interactive Processing interface.

2. Slit Experiment

Using an LED light and a dark box with two thin vertical cuts in one side (at a known distance), generate an interference pattern on a wall by turning the LED light on inside the black box and pointing the side with the two cuts towards a wall (requires a dark room).

List of Parts

• 1 Arduino
• 2 Breadboards
• 2 Buttons
• 3 LEDs (1 blue, 1 green, 1 red)
• Alligator clips
• 1 Pair of glasses
• 2 Straws

Instructions

1. Begin by properly placing the circuitry elements on the Arduino board. One button, which is used to trigger the left light, must use pin 13 and should be arranged to a schematic similar to that as described in the Arduino blogs. The button for the right light should be using pin 12. Our left, right, and red LEDs should be using pins 10, 11, and 9, respectively.
2. In order to attach the LED’s to the glasses, use long wires that have been braided together. These allow us to alter where we place our LEDs while being fairly unobtrusive.
3. Place LEDs in straws and tape them to the corresponding side of the glasses.
4. Load the Arduino with the following code, observe the first light in the sequence, and copy – enjoy!

Code

/*
 Simon Says
 Repeat the sequence of lights given by the button inputs.
 */

// Constants 
int N = 10;
int RED_LED = 9;
int LEFT_LED = 10;
int RIGHT_LED = 11;
int LEFT_BUTTON = 13;
int RIGHT_BUTTON = 12;
int DELAY = 200;
int RED_DELAY = 1000;
// State variables
boolean isShowing; // Are we showing lights?
boolean leftLights[10]; // Each element is true for left, false for right
int i; // leftLights index
int level; // Game level

// the setup routine runs once when you press reset:
void setup() {

 // LEDs
 pinMode(RED_LED, OUTPUT);
 pinMode(LEFT_LED, OUTPUT);
 pinMode(RIGHT_LED, OUTPUT);

// Buttons
 pinMode(LEFT_BUTTON, INPUT);
 pinMode(RIGHT_BUTTON, INPUT);

// Init game
 reset();
}

// Reset game
void reset() {
 i = 0;
 level = 1;
 isShowing = true;
 generateLights();
}

// generate lights array
void generateLights() {
 randomSeed(analogRead(0));
 for (int j = 0; j < N; j++){
 leftLights[j] = random(0, 2);
 } 
}

// the loop routine runs over and over again forever:
void loop() {
 if (!isShowing) {
 checkInput();
 }
 else if (i < level && level <= N) {
 showLights();
 }
 else {
 // Stop showing lights
 isShowing = false;
 i = 0;
 }
}

// Check player input
void checkInput() {
 // Collect input
 int leftButtonState = digitalRead(LEFT_BUTTON);
 int rightButtonState = digitalRead(RIGHT_BUTTON);
 // Check
 if (leftButtonState == HIGH && leftLights[i]) {
 // Left hit
 i++;
 show(LEFT_LED);
 }
 else if (rightButtonState == HIGH && !leftLights[i]) {
 // Right hit
 i++;
 show(RIGHT_LED);
 }
 else if (rightButtonState == HIGH || leftButtonState == HIGH) {
 // Miss
 show(RED_LED);
 reset();
 }

 // Check level completion
 if (i == level) {
 i = 0;
 level++;
 isShowing = true;
 }
}

// Show lights
void showLights() {
 // Show lights
 if (leftLights[i++]) {
 show(LEFT_LED);
 }
 else {
 show(RIGHT_LED);
 }
}

// play light
void show(int led) {
 int d = DELAY;
 if (led == RED_LED) {
 d = RED_DELAY;
 }

 digitalWrite(led, HIGH);
 delay(d);
 digitalWrite(led, LOW);
 delay(d);
}