HyPod - Development Area What & When First a few introductory data: HyPod is a project I'm proposing for CAiiA+STAR, as part of a 3-month residence, beginning June 2000 and ending August 2000 - hopefully with an exhibit during the Consciousness Reframed conference. This is a place to discuss the technical aspects of the project - basically, to make it work! I already have some people collaborating with me, including Ranjit Bhatnagar and Ed Stastny. If you feel you can help in some way, please send me your comments! Concept The concept page is up with diagrams and such. More detailed explanations of the project elements will be added as they become available. I'm setting up a little discussion mailing list at hypod@verle.com so all the people participating in the development can talk with each other. There's also the Sito Beta discussion page, we just have to make sure everybody in the "development team" has access to it... Hardware What I want is something that can act as a gigantic joystick - that's the kind of movement that people will make, leaning around. Jumping would be like hitting the fire button. As I said before: the cheapest the best, because I'm not sure about how much funding will be available for this. I would love to be able to set it up from, say... second-hand videogame parts :) The initial idea of using Ascension Tech motion-tracking devices was ruled out based on high price and fragility. Ranjit suggested pressure sensors and I'm researching them. His ideas are: 1. each grid square on the floor has four pressure sensors, one on each corner. Navigate by stepping or shifting weight. Should be relatively cheap and easy to implement. MY FAVORITE! 2. give each visitor a bicycle reflector on a stick. A high camera with light source (infrared maybe?) can see the reflectors very well, so it doesn't take sophisticated image processing to find them. It's still complex software to track the moving dots. I thought of this because at SIGGRAPH a few years back they had a presentation with a concept kind of similar to yours, where the mass actions of thousands of people (each with a reflector paddle) became the user interface to a pong game. (Left side of hall against right side of hall!) 3. ultrasonic sensors over each square can detect movement. But it would probably be hard to tell what direction they're moving in. 4. similar to 1, but just put a grid of 4 or 9 pressure switches on each square. Visitor steps on different switches. -- I guess we would need two computers, one for figuring out the data from the participants, and other for running the navigation interface. Suggested connections between them are MIDI and serial interface. Software Ranjit suggested Macromedia Director, for the transitions and such. I like the transitions in Flash, but its programming environment is not as powerfull, and it cannot interact with external devices, except maybe for the keyboard and mouse... In any case, it will need to be linked to HyGrid's database. I don't know if it will be possible to have it reflect dinamic changes (new pieces) or it will show just a "frozen" state of HyGrid. There's also the question of managing the viewing patterns. I think it will be too much to let it for the participants to find out the "valid" patterns, so I tought about some clue, like little leds in the floor to mark the possible positions. The "center" square could be either a fixed one in the middle, or whatever square the user chooses to stand on first. I appreciate any suggestions regarding the software, including offers to help writing it! :) ---------------- last updated: march 12, 2000 -lenara