INTERSKIN: PROCESS PICTURES

INTERSKIN: CONCEPT

E-TEXTILES: BUNNY EARS HAT AND MITTENS

Photos by Henrik Haanes

E-textile workshop with KHiO. Woolen hat and mittens with embedded sensors and LEDs, group work with Henrik and Silje from KHiO.

ALTERED PERCEPTION: DYNAMIC INFOGRAPHIC

AHO pulse from Tuva Eikås on Vimeo.

Projector project answering Altered Perception brief. Teamwork with Ulrikke and Julie. AHO pulse is a dynamic infographic showing the general activity level at school using the number of entrances/exits through the main entrance , the number of coffees sold in the cafeteria and printer activity as indicators.

ARDUINO TOY PROJECT: KLOSS VIDEO

Kloss from Tuva Eikås on Vimeo

A big thank you to Gard for playing so beautifully with our building blocks and to wonderful Detektivbyrån for letting us use their song "Dygnet Runt" as soundtrack.

ARDUINO TOY PROJECT: KLOSS INTERACTIVE BUILDING BLOCKS

ARDUINO TOY PROJECT: STATUS

sanding, programming, soldering

ARDUINO TOY PROJECT: CONCEPT = INTERACTIVE BUILDING BLOCKS

Julie and I have decided to make a set of building blocks with built-in knock sensors. Our first set will be a city featuring characteristic Oslo elements. Other sets could be zoo sets or farm sets.

Some inspiration: wooden building blocks, geometric shapes,

sporadic splashes of colour and a dash of Oslo nostalgia.

Idea sketch

Specific Oslo buildings we are thinking of using are the royal palace, city hall, Oslo cathedral, the parliament and the opera. Perhaps also Holmenkollen or Bislett sports arenas. These buildings will give a sound feedback when tapped. There will also be a police car, an ambulance and a fire truck that will move forward and sound their sirene when tapped. Other vehicles might include an Oslo tram and a truck.

In addition there will be a number of neutral blocks, blocks with icons and blocks with some colour for building more houses and creating a city.

ARDUINO TOY PROJECT: RESEARCH

We took a trip to a toy store to find out what kind of interactive toys are on the market.

Key words: plastic, bright colours, annoying sounds and very gender specific toys.

TACTILE MEMORY

On the assignment of creating a tactile theatre, we created a tactile memory game. It mimics the traditional memory game setup, but the visual sense is replaced by the tactile sense. We wanted to test people's tactile memory. Is it as good as the visual one?

We built a box with 30 compartments and filled it with 15 different materials; leaves, styrofoam, sand, two different qualities of sandpaper, water, bottle caps, sawdust, banana peels, berries, bubble wrap, paper, metal shavings, sponges and gravel. The compartment lids had openings with a fabric lock to make it hard to see the contents.

The challenge was finding tactile pairs and identifying the materials.

User tests provided useful feedback. Some of our test persons were uncomfortable touching things they could not see, and tactile memory varied a great deal between testers. The testers generally found it harder to remember placement in the tactile memory game than in regular memory - they knew they had felt the same material before, they just didn't know where. They recognized pairs, but had a harder time identifying the material. The game became more engaging when people were competing against each other, and when they did, they never mentioned what they felt. A big difference from when people were trying the game by them selves and being very vocal and describing what they felt in every single compartment.

This project was first and foremost an experimental project - we wanted to test people's tactile memory. But the result also has commercial potential - it could be a game both for blind children and seeing children, or for blind and seeing children to play together. Also, loose containers would make it easy to change the contents so it could be a new game every time.