MSc. Media Technology – Hardware and Physical Computing, Fall 2018
In collaboration with Susanne Spek and Nicole Louise de Groot
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could draw in space? A drawing that is based on your own movements, depending on your activity, your speed and the way you move. Your movements will be translated into a unique and personal drawing. For this project we created an interactive color palette, where a user can stand on and where it is possible to draw in
space. Users can select colors by stepping on them and make drawings in space while holding and moving a controller.
The installation makes use of 8 pressure mats, each representing a different color. The controller consists of a tube holding a smartphone, using the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors inside the device. Sensor values (speed and rotation form the smartphone and pressure from the mats) are translated into a drawing made with colored dots, that are projected on the floor via a beamer.
We connected 3 types of hardware: an Arduino board, a computer (with a beamer) and a smartphone. With HTML5 and Javascript in a browser we could use the same code on smartphone and computer. We used Johnny-Five, a JavaScript Robotics & IoT Platform that can run on Arduino.
A NodeJS socket server enables continuous communication between the 3 clients. The socket server handles the incoming messages from the Arduino and the smartphone, and updates the web client running in the browser on the computer. Each frame, a dot is drawn on the screen. Input from the pressure mats is used to assign the dot’s color value, smartphone accelerometer data are used to assign location and size values. The computer is connected to a beamer that projects the constantly updating view.
A serendipitous finding: by putting the smartphone in a tube
the angular motion of the smartphone is being filtered. This gave the user more control over the smartphone sensors, and thus allowed for more fun when drawing.
