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.

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.

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

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

]]> http://kieramcauliffe.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/infra-red-lights/feed/ 0 heff touchScreenBlobs2 http://kieramcauliffe.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/business-cards-stickers-ssshhhh/ http://kieramcauliffe.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/business-cards-stickers-ssshhhh/#comments Sat, 28 May 2011 10:05:35 +0000 kiera http://kieramcauliffe.wordpress.com/?p=420 ]]> So for our exhibition we’ve ordered from MOO a business card company, mini business cards and stickers. We were originally just aiming to get our business cards but thought the stickers would be a nice additive to the night and our exhibition stand. I’m not gonna quite say exactly what we’re doing with the stickers, you can see it for yourself on the night if you come It’s a well kept secret at the moment. But here’s the images were using first for our business cards and then the images for our stickers, enjoy: