Builidng the Bus Stop
04 Jun 2011 Leave a Comment
in Bus Shelter, design, Exhibition
Sorry with all the report writing the blog has been slightly neglected.
We got the shelter built, however we had a slight problem that the plans were read backwards, so it’s more of a wall than a shelter. I think this mightn’t be a huge problem, though it does change how we were going to display the final prototype.
Here are a couple of shots of it going up in our studio.
Website
31 May 2011 Leave a Comment
Some screen grabs from the website. Since it’s just an informative site its a simple low-key design. There will be a link to our blog within it, so that the full process can be seen.
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iPad User Testing
31 May 2011 Leave a Comment
in focus groups, project design, Research, touchscreen
While sorting through our files for the documentation I came across some of our User testing we did. As part of researching into technologies I did a little testing using the iPad. The aim of the user testing was to test multi-touch technologies; to find out how comfortable people were with using them, how the interacted with it and what was their experience and any comments in general.
My brother kindly let me annoy his neighbours one evening and I got a couple of them to play a downloaded two-player game of finger football. I chose this group of people as my brother lives on a small street behind the Mercy Hospital. Most of the people on the street would be in their 20′s. They haven’t lived their very long and recently some of the empty houses filled, so they knew everyone to see but actually hadn’t properly some of them. I felt this mimicked the idea that you might see the same people everyday at the bus stop but not actually know them.
His neighbours were great sports and were kind enough to give me a few mins of their time. General findings were that;
- People got very comfortable with the touch surface very quickly
- They were more familiar with touch screens because of newer phones
- They found typing hard, but thought that if the device would be larger then that might not be such a problem
- The games to be chosen had to be simple, the finger football was surprisingly hard to play
- Maybe some instructions should be given for game play (this was in reference to the surprisingly hard learning curve for touch football)
An interesting point to note is that other neighbours were more inclined to stop with the level of noise that was coming from those using the device. So the level of shouts of annoyance/winning drew attention. Possibly could have some effect on the game choices.
It should be noted that this user testing was done in regards to the original arcade game idea, which is why I asked some follow up questions on gameplay
Here are a couple of photos, some are a bit blurry, the camera person was laughing a lot.
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Table Prototype
30 May 2011 Leave a Comment
in project design, prototype, touchscreen Tags: multi touch table, multitouch DIY
Sorry for the backlog of posts, but at least now you can see the progress we have made!
So, we are having a simple wooden shelter made to hold the touchscreen. We tried unsuccessfully to find other shelters to use, but they are quiet expensive and no one was willing to lend us one for our project. We had almost found a touchscreen but unfortunately it was not multitouch, only single touch and therefore would defeat the purpose.
So as we knew that we wouldn’t be getting the shelter until late into the project we still had to do some testing and build the touchscreen so we made a touch table that would then be vertically integrated into the project.
So here are some shots of the set up that was used. (Thanks to Ray for the table)
The interal set up of mirror lights and camera
After it was calibrated
Infra Red lights
30 May 2011 Leave a Comment
in interaction design, project design, prototype, touchscreen Tags: Environmental Lights, infra red, IR lights, multitouch DIY, NUI Group
So to actually get our multitouch working properly we had to have an infra red light source, we had a MTBiggie set up, but we really weren’t getting much blobs, they were a bit sketchy. (sorry about the poor quality, camera phone images)
this is with a serious amount of pressure on the screen
So we went looking for solutions to this problem. Our first thought was to use an infra red lamp, however we then have the problem of red light and heat.
We then went looking at soldering lights, however this seemed like a pretty complicated idea and we would definitely need to find someone with soldering skills.
So finally we went looking on the NUI Group and found Environmental Lights. After some research we decided to buy their bars as our IR emitters.
The people at Environmental Lights were wonderful and extrememly helpful, I wish we had found them much sooner. So here are a few shots of when the lights came and how much stronger the blobs were afterwards!
After the IR lights were added with light pressure
Bluetooth, bluetooth where forth art thou…
24 May 2011 Leave a Comment
in issues arrising, project design, prototype
Throughout this project we’ve wanted a trigger action when a potential user walked into our interactive space. Through research we found that 83.3% of users surveyed had Bluetooth, this came out higher than wifi, 3g and infrared. We decided to use this to create a trigger. It was something that I spent a lot of time researching and looking for programs and research on bluetooth. 
Unfortunately, smartphones seemingly are too smart for our bluetooth advertising. Iphones in particular but also many Android phones are not automatically discoverable when your bluetooth is switched on. This seems to be mainly to reduce battery usage, but it does mean that unless a user manually edits their settings our bluetooth trigger is rendered useless.
Despite trying to find a workaround we’ve sadly had to say goodbye to our trigger and try something different. The interesting thing, is that in all my research into bluetooth marketing, this was never mentioned by those selling the marketing packages.
Bus Stop Construction
24 May 2011 Leave a Comment
So, Kiera’s boyfriends dad is building us a bus shelter to house our project. He’s a carpenter so we gave him rough plans and the sizes and let him loose.
When we were thinking about the design and how the piece will look we were thinking of ways that we could add a little realism to our project. The lovely people at Bus Eireann have kindly lent us a little topper for the top of our bus stop. I think it’s pretty cool. At least everyone will be able to recognise that it is a bus shelter!!
Interactive bus stops are all the rage these days
22 May 2011 Leave a Comment
Yesterday we were looking over some of our research and we came across an article about interactive bus stops that were launched late novemebr 2010 in san Francisco by Yahoo.
Basically our entire original idea (with even similar designs) all nicely packaged and working nicely. They even had the idea of competition between bus stops (you can see that in the video). I’m glad our idea changed over time with user testing and feedback, as it would have been very discouraging to see that our idea was done.
We didn’t come across them until yesterday as they got a lot of publicity with MacWorld 2011 Expo this year. Our research into what similar technologies were inplace had finished by that stage last year. It just shows you that you can’t it back when it comes to new and emerging technologies.
On a side note, I think our arcade games were a better idea!!
Hacking the PS3 Eye
19 May 2011 3 Comments
in prototype, touchscreen, Videos
Ok so to make our touchscreen, we first needed to make an infrared camera. To do this we hacked a PS3 Eye camera. Following this tutorial.
The tools!
So anyways the things we needed were:
- PS3 Eye Camera
- A variety of small screwdrivers for the teeny tiny screws
- The inside of a floppy disk
- and a stanley knife
The process is pretty simple, disassemble the camera, remove the IR filter lens and then replace with a makeshift filter (floppy disk material) re-assemble and you should have an infra-red camera.
Actually doing the above is very slow, between opening the case and the screws that seemingly get smaller as you go along. However, eventually I got is all working. The next step is to get it working with our multitouch device.
For our 2nd prototype we set up a simple table, from here. Our more high fidelity prototype uses IR led bars to provide the infra red light, the simple table uses IR light from ambient lighting, so it’s not as accurate or easy to callibrate or get accurate readings.
I’ve included images from the process of hacking our camera below:
*Correction it’s a PS3 Eye not PS2
Before I got my hands on her!
Got the back off, eventually.
Got the front off!! just get the lens off now
40 mins later got the pesky IR lens out!
What is looks like with the new filter in
Building our touch screen:materials
13 May 2011 Leave a Comment
in prototype, touchscreen
So as part of this project we are building a touchscreen, I’m going to cover in the next couple of posts exactly how we did that. The first one we built was while we were waiting for our infrared light source. So here are the materials we gathered (minus the infrared light source, I’ve been told that it should work to a certain extent without the light source so for the first prototype we thought that would be ok)
First we got some Perspex:(free from Ger in Sample-Studios)
Our PSEye Camera that will need to be hacked!
Some trusty greaseproof paper and projector!
and a projector
In the next post, I’ll take you through how we hacked our PSEye camera so that it could pick up infra red light!
