tianhony@andrew.cmu.edu – Page 2 – Making Things Interactive, Fall 2020

Visual&Sound Cues => Mechanical

This is my dog and her favorite toy: a blue and green rubber ball. She recently got into the habit that when she wants us humans to play the ball with her and we don’t give her attention, she would roll the ball into places she can’t reach, usually under a desk or behind the TV set. Then she whines until someone gets it for her, which could be minutes if no one decides to get it.

The process of retrieving the ball involves bending down, looking for the ball under table, get it out with a 6ft long stick or with hands. And sometimes when I have my headphones on, I don’t hear her whining.

This is frustrating for both my dog, and my family. So I came up with the idea of making a device that could fit under the table. It can detect the dog’s whining sound, move under the table to find the ball, and push the ball out.

Kinetic Interaction Examples

This swing analyzer is put on golf gloves to sense and analyze golf swings by detecting motions.

This smart night light automatically lights up when someone walk by it within a certain distance, and it turns off either after a set period of time after the person leaves.

An alarm clock that is turned off only after the person gets off the bed and stands on the pad.

“Fore!” Wristband

Background

“Nowadays, most golfers yell “fore” only after they’ve hit an errant shot toward an unsuspecting golfer, but the term which translates to “watch out!” or “heads up!” was originally intended to be used before teeing off.”

—- quote from here

Golf balls can travel really fast in the air, and hitting by golf balls can cause from severe swellings to permanent damages. When you are playing at the golf course, you yell “Fore!” when:

- you didn’t wait for the group in front of you to leave(rude!)
- you hit a really bad ball and you are hitting onto other fairways(not where your ball is suppose to go), and you are not sure whether there are people there.

Because you might hit/injure them, or even just scare them.

When you hear “Fore!” on the golf course, there is usually less than a second for you to react. There are a few things that you can do:

- identify where the sound comes from
- hide at a nearby golf cart or tree
- put your hands on your head
- stay low so that the ball does not hit your head

But usually, it’s hard to identify where the sound comes from within such a short period of time, so one usually attempts to do all of above very confused and hope for the best.

Problem

Ever since the early times in the sport of golf, people rely on yelling and hearing “Fore!” to warn each other about a flying ball coming at their directions. This has issues:

- People with hearing problems don’t receive the warning
- There is not enough time for people to react to identify where the sound comes from

Proposed Solution

My proposed solution is a “Fore!” wristband. Everyone on the golf course will be wearing it, and it can do the followings:

- Sense when “Fore!” warning is made
- Communicate the location/direction of the warning to other wristbands
- Display the direction of the warning

For proof of concept, I will(still don’t have my hardwares yet) use an accelerometer to detect whether a swing is made, a sound sensor to detect whether there is a loud yelling immediately following the swing, and an 8×8 led matrix for the display.

Discussion

The prototype design has a few flaws:

- The sound sensor is chosen so that the golfer does not need to make any additional actions of notify other golfers, but the sound sensor only detects for sound above a certain threshold. It’s common for golfers to yell things other than “Fore!” immediately after the swings. For surrounding golfers, the issue should not be too big because the distance makes their yellings quieter. But for the golfer wearing the wristband, this would raise a problem of sending false alarms to other golfers. Possible solutions can be running speech recognition to ensure that “Fore!” is the word, or adding some additional conditions to avoid false alarms.
- In my prototype, I omitted the wireless communication. But the communication can cause some problems if the wristbands are put in use in the real world, since it’s not uncommon for golf courses to have poor signals. So radio signals set up and maintained by the golf course may be a good solution.

Interesting State Machines

Similar to the Korean bath room state machine, this is a Japanese ramen booth seating chart state machine. It shows how many and which seats are empty.

This water kettle that my mom bought can boil water and also keep the water warm. When the light is red, it means the water is heating, and keep warm is not on. When the light is purple, it means the water is heating and water well be kept warm once it finished boiling. When the light is blue, it means the water is being kept warm.

Visual Rice Cooker States

When I thought about sounds that I rely on in the kitchen, the first thing came to my mind was my rice cooker. I realize that I rarely look at the screen of my rice cooker and heavily relies on the sound of it. In addition, the rice cooker often gives very inaccurate time estimates and sometimes it would take twice the time as it states, which discourages to look at the display even more.

Here is the p5js prototype.

It does still has the idea of a ‘bar graph’, but I was really trying to imitate how the rice change while during the cooking process. I played around with how the size of rice grows individually, and their arrangement and orientation.

Finally, I chose a constant number of rice throughout the ‘growing process’. Their x and y are almost done in perfect grids, but I added a little randomness to prevent individual rice from looking like rotating while maintaining the ‘uniform’ distribution.

I also wanted to show distinct different from the cooking states and done state, and I thought a background color change is more obvious/powerful than just the pattern change, especially when users are far away from the rice cooker.

Making It So Reading #1

I read Exploring Science Through Science Fiction by Professor Luokkala when I took his Science & Science Fiction class, and although these two books study science fictions/sci-fis, they look into very different things. It was interesting to see how the authors of Making It So decided to tackle the structure of their research and presentation. I really like how interfaces in science fiction are studied in a inspiring fashion, i.e. the authors don’t criticize what’s wrong/impossible but what we can learn from them and how they have changed real-world interfaces/products.

What was the most fascinating to me was the amount of data they collected and data visualization. For example, when discussing colors, the authors used color histograms and effectively demonstrated that blue is the most popular color. I knew the psychological fact that blue is the universal preferred color, but I didn’t know that blue was used the most in sci-fi movies due to technology constraints.

Smart Doorbell (Catherine)

One thing that frustrates me when I ring someone else’s doorbell is that I don’t know if people inside the house has heard me ringing the doorbell. Another thing that frustrates me when someone else’s rings my doorbell is that as I’m getting the door, whoever rang the doorbell does not know that I’m coming and keeps ringing the doorbell.

Given the above two scenarios, a smart doorbell that can detect whether people inside the house are ‘on their way’ to get the door and notify the people ringing the doorbell would be helpful for both parties.

In the sketch above, we are looking at this house that has two floors and the person inside is on the second floor. After the doorbell rings, if the person does not move to get the door, the doorbell is red and the person outside should keep ringing the bell. If the person inside is on his/her way to the door, the doorbell turns yellow so the person outside is ensured that he/she has gotten the insider person’s attention. It’s likely that the person inside gets distracted and forget about the door, so if doorbell stays yellow for too long, the person outside could ring the bell again. And finally, if the person inside is near the door already, then the doorbell turns green and the person outside can be prepared to see the door open.