The first week, of the module was supposed to spend on tinkering the code and finding ways to explore and create movement. How to imagine that movement? How does the machine ‘views’ it? What does it feel to be the one doing the movement or observe it?
Sadly instead of working on asking questions and exploring how the code can be implemented we spend the whole day, trying to fix the technical side of the project. Jens provided us with a sketch that should work and which is being run through node and ngrok. For some reason the sketch which was working on my laptop few days ago, it was not possible to get it to run today. I kept getting an error which even after googling I did not know what to do with it. Upgraded node, reinstalled ngrok, downloaded the sketch again and much more but nothing was working.
Since we had signed up for a coaching session, when it was our turn, Clint tried to work on my computer to fix it. The error kept popping up and it was impossible for the code to run with it. In the end, as my last hope I decided to remove node completely from the computer and install it again from scratch. It worked! The possibility to work the sketch was now there, with that we continued to getting feedback for our ideas.
We had few ideas of movement that might have been interesting to explore.
- Checking the watch
- It has wrist movement
- Hand/Arm movement
- Calculating the distance while running
- Leg movement
- Counting steps
- Movement as a controller
- Instead of buttons why not create a movement that will act like a button
- Controlling the interface with movement
Clint explained that in the end the goal in the project is not how to create a product or have a targeted person that the project would be useful for. It would rather be important to explore how does movements differentiate from each other. He said we should pick either a certain activity, such as checking the watch, or particular part of the body. Like what kind of movements can we do with feet? What would be interesting to explore there and find out? Or if we want to explore body parts such as shoulders, how would we test that out and such? He suggested if we can not do one of those we can just choose a certain movement and ask ourselves questions like – What would be different versions of that movement? How does it feel if we do the movement slowly or we use speed to do it? Does the difference between a gentle movement and harsh can be recognised from the machine while recording.
He recommended to have a brainstorming session in which we will try to explore all the points above, since the technical problems brought us to fall behind with the working schedule.
It is our goal to train the machine to recognise the movements we want to work with. In the first module we worked with already trained sketches which had tons of data in them. In this module we should teach the computer how to recognise the different movements based on the data received from our smartphone.
After the coaching session we had quick brainstorming session, in which we talked about different body parts and their movements, which we would be interested in exploring in the following weeks. We did not opt to pick an activity since it seemed like it offers a lot of constraints. We paid attention on the question like ‘How would it feel to make that movement?’ . In the end we ended up with the following list:
- Fingers
- Forearm
- Wrist
- Ankle
- Torso
- Shoulders
At home, while testing out the constraints of each one of these, I realised few things.
- I am not able to record finger or wrist movement. The size of my phone was one of the problems as it did not allow for me to attach it to my finger.
- The movement of the forearm like either palm up or down, does not make much difference to the machine as it only sees the movement as the same.
- Wrist only movements were difficult to record. Either they had to be mixed with forearm or hand. It was also in some kinds bit limiting as the phone was an obstacle.
- The torso was interesting part to be recorded as it can be very static and not much movement happens. The only movements i tried out was bending and turning left to right.
Pink Prototyping 