Ongoing HCI Project for Digital Service Innovation

Here is a sneak peak of the start-up design I am working on with my group. I did all the graphic design, illustrations, and lead in video production. In this project, I learned alot about research, technology, and business that comes into making a successful start up design.

The start up MVP is a service where you can import your calender and create customizable greeting cards to your loved ones on those dates, as well as spontaneous thank you cards to people. The habit builds up gratitude and helps psychologically for the well-being.

An explanation of the startup will be published later - for now here is the MVP powerpoint design to show my graphic design ability.

After critique, the teacher said we needed to get a real name for our company. So, we renamed it InstaCards. Here is a video I edited and produced to describe what our product does and a quick sketch of the interaction. I cut out the first part, where the video porposes the problem of writing too many wedding thank you cards that our couple Jennifer and Simon has

AUGMENTED REALITY EXPERIENCE - Half of a heart 

HALF OF A HEART AR EXPERIENCE: Made with Joshua Kery, this an AR app experience for two people. When the two people with half hearts get closer together, the heart will magnetize into a whole heart. 

As people become closer in proximity, the closer they become and the stronger connection they form. Our experience could be taken anywhere, as long as two people are close enough in distance. Our two halves of the heart are programmed to come together like a magnet to mirror the attraction between two people who are touching.

Upon further iterations, we see it as a AR experience that could encourage people to form fun connections through Snapchat with different locations and different people in public.

TOOL: Unity3D, C#

Augmented Reality Experience - photo album recapture

AUGMENTED REALITY PHOTO ALBUM: I created a physical photo album which has videos inside the pictures as a way to relive your memories. Here, I grabbed a family video and made them into still images and videos in the album. Since the videos did not come with audio, I had to edit online audio and sometimes create my own. In this project, I wanted to explore ways of capturing and remembering your memories in the most real form which includes movement and sounds. The photo album is a way of looking back at the happy moments that you would want to remember and cling on to, in case you forget.

Technically, I struggled with having the videos play normally on the phone when the image target was detected. The phone would just have a still image of the video, because the video lagged so much. I tried using HandBrake, preloading assets, and other things, but I could not get the videos to play well on the phone. I am going to continue to try out taking out the lag on the phone and take better documentation in my free time.

I think this is an idea that could be developed further if I were to make it again, and I also think it would be interesting to further develop the aesthetics of the physical album. If I were to iterate, I  want to create a narrative with the movies, and place more specified and interesting audio recording which would  reveal more of the family  in a more real, and not just idealized, sense.

Thanks to Claire, Sydney, Peter, and Alex for helping out. Special thanks to Jim R Cave for the youtube home videos

TOOL: Unity, C#, Reaper

Arduino Drawing Translation Machine

This is a drawing machine that trasnlates your XYZ movement of your pen from the accelerometer to lines on paper that the machine interprets. Here, I am writing my signature again and again, but the machine is only reading it as lines based on how I programmed it on arduino. This is a gesture to represent to loss of personality and human touch when things are translated by technology and machine

Arduino Gloves for Attraction

ABSTRACT CLOCK

ABSTRACT CLOCK: This is an abstract clock that accelerates the decaying process of a clementine. It is meant to show how decay and time are related, and how decay can sometimes be beautiful, disgusting, and add on to the passing of time. I've made it 3D to create a more viseceral and real feeling

TOOL: P5.JS

ANIMATED GIF

ANIMATED GIF: I've coded a fox character to show the duality of personalities and the underlying structure of an animal. I've also used Golan Levin's easing function to make the movement of the hands move more cleanly.

TOOL: Processing

ASEMIC WRITING WITH A DRAWING PLOTTER

ASEMIC WRITING: This is a generative code that I made to create variations of chairs in a writing language. Anemic writing is a fake language to describe anything, and this is a language for chairs. The chairs initially have an underlying structure (1. Seat, 2. Legs, 3. Back) that can be decorated and built upon to create different variations and design. My design is plotted in AxisDraw, a robotic drawing machine.

TOOLS: P5.JS and AxisDraw