Day 1:
This is the first week of the lab weeks, my partner and I were assigned to Playful Interaction. This was our first choice so we were very happy. We attended in person class and immediately started brainstorming ideas for our product. We were really in love with the idea of making a wearable camera on a hat. We ordered the correct parts we needed which consisted of a camera module, 9V batteries, Bluetooth receiver and 9V battery clip. We also started searching for tutorials on how to connect the camera to the Arduino.
Day 2:
We made an HMW question “HMW make taking pictures more playful”. This allowed us to ideate on the existing idea of taking pictures from a hat. We also tested out open source face detection on p5.js. We looked at detecting faces and the person’s emotions. The HMW was helpful but in the end, cost more time than it was worth. We didn’t like any of the ideas that we came up with and started to rethink the idea of a wearable camera.
Day 3:
We started following tutorials on how to connect the camera to our Arduino. We bought the OV7670 camera. Luckily there were a lot of youtube tutorials that we watched. Half the day passed and we still couldn’t manage to connect the camera to the Arduino. We started to think that maybe the camera wouldn’t work out as we were spending way too long on the connection and was costing us time that we didn’t have. We then went back to the drawing board and started to think of different ideas that we could make. We thought of an idea to track how much water a person drinks. We spoke to Danica and she told us not to focus on the product but instead experimenting with the technology. This was exactly where we were going wrong, we were having tunnel vision on the product and was neglecting the experimentation aspect.
Day 4:
Since our talk from before, we stopped trying to think of an idea first and instead played around with different technologies. We set up our ultrasonic sensor with processing to grow a circle with the distance an object was from the sensor. We also set up a capacitive touch sensor on a can and every time we would move the cap, a light would turn on. It was definitely refreshing to play around with different technologies as it opened our mind up to much more than what we were aware of. I wish we had done this on our first day instead of focusing on our idea of the product.
Day 5:
My partner remembered that they had an accelerometer at home from a previous project a few years ago. We started to play around with the accelerometer and see if we could get it working. We thought maybe we could think of making a fitness game that took input from the accelerometer and then did something with those values. We thought of integrating the accelerometer into a glove, waistband or possibly a shoe. We also looked at possibly doing something with projection mapping and watched a couple of videos on that.
