I sat in on a presentation a couple weeks ago titled Avatar-Based Design Research. An advisor for our Samsung sponsored design studio was making the case that Avatars can express someone’s authentic, or maybe desired self. This could make them useful in discovering the invisibles about a person- specifically what they desire, how they see themselves, or how they wish they were. When people create avatars, they do so without limitations in place for how they present themselves. In online virtual worlds like Second Life, users can assume a much wider variety of personalities and materiality with their avatars than is possible in their real lives, and with less of the risk typically associated with being different, or expressing yourself.

It sounded interesting to me, and even though we didn’t use this method for our project (we did a lot of other good stuff) we talked about it enough to work out roughly how we would have done it. We would have tried to recruit around 10 people. Ideally, half would already have an online avatar, and half wouldn’t. The participants would create their own avatar with an online tool like Meez. We decided that it was probably best to conduct an interview and user survey before asking the participant to create an avatar for themselves. This would give us a baseline to ask better questions once we have their Avatar.

More recently, I realized I already had a project where I was doing something really similar. I did an interactive project sophomore year where we were taking a bunch of data collected from our class and building an interface to hold all of it. My group created kaleidoscopes for each student based on the data they gave us. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was really making their avatars.

Yes! Right? They designed the current widget to be glance-able which is great, but I’d bet it’s the most “used” widget, and so it would probably be beneficial to support more granularity. Maybe it’s a case of Apple’s minimalist design aesthetic getting in the way of giving people what they want. But rather than linking me out to Accuweather.com I’d really prefer they keep me in the dashboard experience, and display the extra information with Apple-like clarity.

This was almost a year ago now, but I wanted to write a little bit about the process. It took around three months to get a working prototype (being in DAAP full-time doesn’t allow much free time for extracurriculars). I had a friend who was in to the idea also so we worked together.

Our list of parts

1. 18" × 20" × .4" piece of acrylic
2. Logitech webcam
3. 20 OSRAM SFH485 Infrared LED’s
4. Power supply
5. Wires
6. Silicon rubber surface
7. Projection surface

The Basic Idea

We shine infrared light into the edge of the acrylic screen. Most of the light bounces around inside the acrylic until something interrupts, or ‘frustrates’, the light. This phenomenon is called frustrated total internal reflection, or FTIR. To put it simply, Putting your finger down on the acrylic reflects light downward.

Image credit Jeff Han, http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirsense/ftirschematic.gif

We modified our webcam to be able to see infrared light and placed it underneath our acrylic surface. Software processes images from the webcam and tracks finger movement. Finger movements and presses are sent as events to an application that is projected onto the acrylic screen.

Fine Tuning

After we had the basic setup working, I had my dad put together a more permanent setup to house all the parts. He built a wood frame to hold the acrylic and LED’s and attached legs to it. I bought a DDR dance pad off of Ebay and sacrificed it for a silicon rubber layer housed inside. I attached this directly on top of the acrylic surface, and then added a layer of mylar for a projection surface on top of that. The layer of silicon rubber helped to improve the touch sensitivity. We were able to borrow a projector from our professor which helped keep our overall cost down to under $200.

It was a fun project, but we didn’t document the process nearly as well as we should have. You can see some more photos from the project on our Flickr album. For anyone interested in trying to build one of their own, I have to mention NUI Group as a great resource. I was fortunate to find the NUI community early on during my research, the people there were a huge help. They are also home to the open source multi-touch software Touchlib, which I used to test out my prototype.

I got extremely lucky in finding a great guy to rent a place from. He’s been awesome about showing me around and making sure I’ll have a positive experience. He’s leaving tonight to go out of the country for a couple months to work on a non-profit project and I’ll be taking care of his place. It’s a bit disappointing to have him leave after he’s been such a welcoming host.

Now that I’ve had some time to use this site and really get a feel for its successes and failures, I’m going to introduce some small changes over the next couple weeks. I’ve been thinking about what needs to change for awhile but finally have some free time to get it done. I’ll be working in the evenings to publish some new posts and projects as well, so check back soon.

Modus Operandi

I spent many week nights(more than I’d admit) behind my desk at MAYA’s office putting together this latest version of my online portfolio. My desire to increase my output, both visual and verbal, encouraged me to integrate a blog alongside my projects. The notion is that this forces me to articulate my thoughts, improve my writing, and test new ideas before they subside into the back of my mind. Calling this extra portion of my site a blog also requires me to keep it somewhat current, as I think the name implies. Considering my schedule and work load during school quarters this may be an especially challenging task– but one I’m up for.

Giving credit where it is due

The entire site, including each project, is driven by WordPress. I used Upstart Blogger’s Minim theme as a base when designing the layout. The styled headings of pages and blog posts are set in Whitney Light and made possible by sIFR. Full size images are shown on the project pages using Lightbox JS.