Photo: Boudewijn Bollmann
This is me presenting my AQAb wearable and the Digitale Werkplaats Den Bosch
at the ISEA2010 excursion in Eindhoven at Baltan Laboratories, August 25th. It was an inspiring day. Nice to meet interested people from all over the
world.
Last week a major hurdle was taken for this project.
1) I held my presentation for a very interested audience of around 200 students from the Design Academy in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. I was very nervous but once I got started things went OK. I only had 10 minutes so I focussed on the design process. The audience was also design orientated so I didn’t want to bother them with too much technique.
Presentation at Design Academy
Opcacity and outline change depending on data
2) I finished the website www.aqab.nl I’m still amazed by the swiftness with which I realised this project. I’m very happy with the Flash app. Even though the data is fake (for now) it does give a good insight into the power of the app. I think I’m most proud of the icon and the way in which the outline colour changes to indicate good, bad or neutral smell. It’s just so easy to work with the Google Maps for Flash API. Great job, good documentation too! You can just use all the build in functionality in a very simple way by using the classes. Also check out the check boxes with which you can select all the days of a month, not as simple as it looks to program…
3) I’ve edited the video and put it online as a Flash flv file and you can play in from the homepage using the simple player. There wasn’t very much useful material for the motorway scene, so I’ve had to improvise a little. I think the rest of the video runs smooth enough. It gives a good impression of how to use the wearable.
There are still some things to be done: the displays don’t light up more then four rings per gas at the same time, I’ll have to change that for more pollution. Maybe just light up the smallest and the largest. The Nickle Cadmium don’t supply enough power either and I don’t want to use more batteries. I’ll have to work on the Bluetooth connection. And I’ll have to interpret the Arduino values and recalculate them to ppm for every gas.
So keep an eye on this blog. All announcements will go through the website, the five most recent entrees of this blog are listed there as well.
Now the biggest part of building the wearable is done it’s time to work on presentations. Two weeks ago we did a video and photo shoot of all the pieces. I brought my model Hans to make sure I get consistent documentation.
After some discussion we decided to film and take pictures outside. As my piece is made to be worn outside and only has a function outside this made the most sense. Just outside there was an interesting and attractive urban landscape. A mixture of trees and flats. This is exactly the sitting in which the vest shall be worn. So we took the pictures there.
For the video we stuck to a very simple script of Hans stepping outside and interacting with the vest. Demonstrating a way in which it can be used.
As there was some delay it started getting darker and colder at the end of the shoot. This made the displays function less well because I haven’t yet set up the temperature dependant heating times. I haven’t seen any of the results but I think it will give a nice impression of the piece.
I’ve also started building the website. The design for the interactive maps with pollution isn’t ready yet but the rest of the design was. It’s good to see all the information collected in one place. I’ve integrated a nice PHP feed renderer in the website. The five most recent items of this blog will automatically displayed on a webpage. The main colours are black and pink (I never used them before) as you can also see in the logo I designed. 