OoodBird-sketches

Cat Petting Simulator:

I love cats, and have been feeling very deprived of cats, so I was thinking of making a program that simulates the feeling of petting a cat. Tapping on the screen will make the cat move either on its stomach or back (tapping in a very gentle non violent way) and swiping left or right will allow you to pet the cat causing it to make a purring sound in response.

Space explorer:

This project is meant to focus on the satisfaction that comes from spinning an object, in this case a globe.  The user can tap to generate a new planet it will have random facts or possibly real facts about this planet (depending on how hard each option is to implement). The use swipes to left or right to make the planet spin and can enjoy it more that way.

Task manager:

This will be a way to organize someone’s calendar. The tasks will appear in order of most to least urgent and by tapping on will be able to switch to the next task. swiping left on a selected task will archive it and swiping right will allow you to create a new task that will automatically be set to 10 minutes after the one currently selected. One can of course manually change the times and events. This is designed for daily tasks (in a more implemented version for example it could appear on a home screen or something).

tale-soli-sketches

I want to have more options and hear others opinion on these so I came up with more than 3 ideas. I’m not sure which idea is most interesting/ possible to implement in a week of a timeframe so I’ll include sketches to all, but I’ll only explain the three ideas I find most suitable/interesting for this project.

1. Virtual Bookshelf

Idea: 

Often times I find myself not reading enough books. Libraries are either closed or operating with limited hours due to covid19, making reading books even harder for everyone. To be honest, reading a book is totally achievable even without having libraries to be open, but our book options are relatively limited. I wanted to recreate the experience of having some options to choose from when reading  a book/searching for a certain topic-related book.

How it works:

I’m thinking to have “swipe” to shift through the options on the bookshelf and “tap” to select the book.

Each title of the book will be a broad category, and the content of the book will be some random information of that topic. For example, “recipes” would give a recipe of a random dish, and “motivation” would give some random quote that motivates you. If the first content doesn’t satisfy you, then you can “swipe” to generate another one.

Hopefully I could connect to some sort of data set/API (if there is one) that I could potentially draw a random piece of information from.

Potential Challenges:

  • COLLECTING DATA:  I’m currently unaware of any big data/API of random facts/information/quotes of a certain category.

2. Flapping Bird (bottom sketch)

Idea:

Exercising is not happening in my life these days and I’ve been losing a lot of muscles.. A lot of my friends also related to the lack of movement due to covid19 and social distancing, so I wondered if I could make something that at least works out my arm. So I thought of this idea, where the player would be required to move their arm to “tap” to make the bird fly through the sky.

How it works:

“Tap” to make the bird flap. The bird might fall (i.e. game over) if you don’t “tap” often, but you don’t have to “tap” all the time because oftentimes birds ride air current instead of flapping rigorously.

Potential Add-on:

“swipe” to make the bird go left/right of the screen?

Potential Challenges:

I realized Soli can’t recognize consecutive motions as well as a single independent motion. It also often recognizes one motion as another (ex. “tap” as “swipe” or vice versa), so perhaps it’d lead to game over even though the user has been moving arms so much to get the motion of tapping across…

On a bright side, it’d lead to more arm exercise? Although I get annoyed when the sensor keeps reading my intended motion as another, so perhaps it might annoy others too..

3. Stay Clean (covid19 edition?)

Idea:

Due to covid-19, many people including myself began to use disinfecting products much more often. I came up with this little app that swipes between the three interactive pieces related to our daily lives with covid19.

How it works:

Swipe left or right to move to the previous/next interactive piece:

a. hand sanitizer

“Tap” or “Swipe down” to push down the hand sanitizer bottle and make a little pile of hand sanitizer next to the bottle.

b. wiping surfaces

“Swipe up” & “Swipe down” to wipe out the virus.

c. wear mask properly

“Tap” to begin/end the game, “swipe up/left/right” accordingly to make the person on the screen correctly wear their mask. I got the idea from all those people who don’t wear their masks properly in the public space. (Mask is not a chin guard.. )

Potential Challenges:

  • Would I be able to implement all three within the week of time? I’d be drawing all the visuals in illustrator on top of coding the interactive part. How realistic is this to all be done in a week with preparing for midterms?
  • Same as in the second idea: Soli often detects one motion as another, so what if the user is having fun wiping surfaces, for example, and is so close to being done but then soli reads their motion as swiping left/right and changes to the next piece?

lampsauce-soli-sketches

Idea 1: A note-taking or brainstorming interface for n-ary trees. Using visualization tools like D3.js, data and, more importantly, thoughts can be nicely organized into a word tree which resembles a JSON. I think that using the Soli sensor's swipe to navigate such a tree and p5.speech to record thoughts and ideas makes for a unique brainstorming interface. If the interface shows promise, the idea can be expanded by connecting directly to a MongoDB, which also stores data as a JSON.

 

Idea 2: This idea involves some kind of 3d creative toy using Three.js. In order to make the limited gestures meaningful, a sequence of gestures can be used to orient, transform, and place a cube into a world. I think of my ideas this one is the least elegant interface, because consecutive swipes feels like a lot of work for a simple transformation. Anyway, to control a given type of transformation on the cube, the user can swipe into a given control plane and swipe to make the transformations.

 

Idea 3: This idea builds off of the previous idea of creating an environment. In this case, Golan pointed me to Everest Pipkin's game tileset. I quickly made this sketch which allows users to place trees in the 'world.' For the Soli interaction, the user can swipe to edit the 'cursor' position, and speak certain commands to add certain tiles. This is a fun way to create quick compositions that look really nice (all due to the quality of the hand-drawn tiles). Because there are 281 tiles total and each has a relatively concise name, there is a broad range of creative possibilities. Another benefit of using the tiles is that they are isometric and aligned, which makes it very easy to mock up code like this.
In my experience with the Soli sensor, while tap is a promising gesture, I have not gotten it to work. Hence, most of my ideas only rely on swipe gestures and maybe voice recognition as well.

marimonda – soli-sketches

I am still not completely sure of these ideas but they’re directions I’m sort of thinking about.

  1. Weird Landscape Generator

In this one I want to make a generative virtual world that can be traveled around with using gestures,  below I  have sort of an image of what the map would look like. I am interested in also using textures from images but I am still thinking about how I would do this, if I should use ML or perhaps an easier way to get weird generative landscapes (I could always just draw elements?).

2. Conversation agent?

Basically you are having a coffee date with certain people (in a sort of speed dating setting) but its really surreal conversations, ideally in a place that seems like could be a recorded zoom session because that’s the most uncomfortable digital space we are all used to. Swiping gestures could be used back and forth to change a person. It would be fun to work with generative backgrounds/people so that each person is unique. Choices would be things the user would have to say, so that the user can simply eat their dinner/coffee without getting their dirty hands on their phone.

3. Bad voice to text diary:

You use swiping/tapping gestures to reset and go back and forth in the pages. Many words are replaced to make what is being written somewhat nonsensical.

Certain keywords could aid in formatting? “bold” allows words to get bolded, as does “italics” and maybe certain words like “bigger”/”smaller” could change the font size. It would also be fun to experiment with posting these diary entries in social media with IFTTT.

4. Tweet navigator that shows/reflects specific trends/sets of keywords that are chosen from a list (using swipe or tap) to create poetry (it could also be generative, where the user swipes through different generative phrases to find tweets with them). This could also incorporate elements from 3. with speech to text.

thumbpin-soli-sketches

  1. Soundscape about longing

Upload sounds of everyday life, friends’ voices, favorite songs, etc. to the app and create a soundscape by moving/dancing around the phone and using reach, swipe, tap interactions. Music begins when soli senses your presence.

2. Song/composition

Same idea, but you do not upload any sounds and soli interactions produce different melodies/harmonies.

3. Soft phone

Phone is covered in a soft material and emulates a stuffed animal/pillow. “Petting” the stuffed animal translates into the tap and swipe interactions, which the phone will respond to with glowing colors or sound.

4. Productivity

App lets you set the phone to “productivity”/”responsibility” mode. When you reach for the phone while it is in productivity mode you’ll get a notification (e.g. an email via IFTTT) saying to get back to work. If you reach for your phone when you should be asleep, your phone will also yell at you. Group suggestion: include some consequences by automatically generating a tweet when you’re off task

junebug-soli-sketches

I really would like to focus on creating beautiful, mesmerizing art with this project because I really appreciated how different Caroline’s Chalky Weirdos was from other Soli projects because of the introduction to illustrations.

Idea #1: Landscape Pond Visual
Design will include lily pads, water ripples, koi fish flocking, firefly flocking, and maybe more later?
Tap: add more ripples, which the koi fish/fireflies will then avoid the area
Swipe: Change of time of day (swipe right: morning –> noon –> dusk –> night / swipe left: reversal)

Idea #2: Tarot Card Reading
Each card will be hand-illustrated and would like it to be very detailed and look like Caroline’s project
4 card placements with a stack of cards at the bottom in a random array.
Swipe: move a card from stack to a placement
Tap: Flip over the card

Idea #3: Forest Landscape Visual
Inspired by my Looking Outwards 2 post about Manolo Gamboa Naon’s work. Want to create a hypnotizing work of a landscape with generated trees.
In a perfect world, I would like it if the sensor could tell the position of the user’s hand hovering over the phone so then the colors of the trees would shift colors where the hand hovers over
Swipe: make trees rustle/move side to side
Tap: change color variations