Internal Interactions - HCI Concept
- Oct 27, 2020
- 3 min read
Using the recent builds we have been working on for class, with the flex sensors, servo motors, soft potentiometer, RBG LEDs ,etc. our task was to create a piece in which several or in this case all of those parts could work together in one piece.
Just as a refresher here is a video showing the flex sensor and a servo motor in action. You can see more about it in my previous blog post Moving Along at the bottom.
This week we had put together a new set up that uses the soft potentiometer which is like a strip that you can touch in different places to input different values that can result in certain effects. As you can see in this video as I touch the soft pot. in different places the color of the RGB LED changes. (This was also my first time using the RGB LED and it is SO PRETTY.
For this interaction a user will walk up to a large control station in front of a panel that you can see the inners of, large colorful servo motors, with each servo motor attached to an angled white rectangle on the outer side of the wall. These white rectangles can be positioned to bend a large flex sensor in multiple positions, resulting in the RGB LED to light up in different ways depending on the bend in the flex sensor.
At the control station, there is a glowing shape similar to the servo motors that actually work as a soft potentiometers. Each section (top, bottom, left , right) will control a different servo motors (the ones that control the arms, but also the larger servo motors that are just for looks ((since you cant see the ones controlling the arms) and they will be able to see this but as soon as they let go it will start to revert to its original position so they must lock in their desired position with a button that holds the input.
I think this piece would be well suited in a place like the children's science museum.
I would want it to be oversized, very colorful, and also include fun gear/clicking/ exaggerated motor sounds as the servos move so it would be very fun and interesting to interact with.The people would be challenged by a prompt card/plaque to see how many colors that they can get. I think children of a certain age/ development stage will be able to understand and get excited about the moving parts and being able to bend the suspended strip to get the different color changes. Even adults I think would enjoy interacting with this. The educational side and process might be lost on younger children but I think they would still enjoy seeing the large colorful moving parts, sounds, and the colorful light.
There also would be an information plaque that explains how the piece works as a whole as well as focusing on how the individual parts work by themselves and common real world examples of how they are used in everyday life. I think this would create a really fun experience that would be generally very educational and help children understand how more things mechanically work in the world. I think it could get them interested in playing, learning, experimenting, with things like an Arduino Uno kit, which I would have absolutely loved to use as a kid and could encourage people at a younger age to get into engineering, programming, robotics, and just in the tech field in general.
Seriously, as a person who was in AP Science classes and took several tech classes I am surprised that the Arduino Uno Board kit is never something I was aware of existing until I was an adult and I think that is a shame. I hope this piece could give children an introduction that I wish I had. And YES kits are sold in the gift shop! ;)
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