A small summary of my Twitter messages from August - November 2011:
A small summary of my Twitter messages from June - August 2011:
A small summary of my Twitter messages from March - June 2011:
A small summary of my Twitter messages from January - March 2011:
For my interactive installation "Sound Drawings" I decided to use the Harmony Drawing application. Meanwhile, the single brush version worked pretty stable with the sound analyzing. There was still one thing missing. It would be much cooler if more than one person can draw on the canvas. From the technical view it was very easy to implement. In the beginning I was a little bit scared if the realtime feedback is still good with more brushes at the same time. It was! For this reason here is the source code and my versions of testing for you.
I prepared a screencast for getting an idea and overview how it works. The principles are exactly the same as in the first version. The only exception is the "brushID" as a new parameter. Every API call uses this syntax:
apiFunctionName brushID parameter1 parameter2 ...
For creating a new brush use the command "setBrush brushID brushType". Afterwards you can use the API command "setCoordinate brushID xPos yPos" for drawing programmatically. If you want to use the mouse for drawing you must use the API command "selectBrush brushID" before drawing directly on the canvas!
All JavaScript codes and Max / MSP patches are included in the example file. For the sound drawing patch you must install the Max MSP Fiddler object, before you can try experimenting.
In the end of november I was a part of the Sound & Vision 4 concert for Music and Media Technology at the Anton Bruckner University.The Sound & Vision concert serie allows young musician and audio-visual artists to present their new experimental artworks and installations.
Poster
Programme #1
Programme #2
In my installation "Sound Drawings" the musicians can use their instruments for drawing an abstract painting. The pitch and the volume of their instruments paint the canvas with an harmonious-sensitive-line-based brush (a digital ribbon brush). The installation tries to put the aesthetic experience of music and visual on an equipollent level. Usually , the music defines the visual experience (see the battle between DJs and VJs) or vice versa. The realtime visual feedback gives the musicians an additional channel for improving and influencing their improvised perfomance. The musicians are oriented towards the visual aesthetics of their drawing and their bandmates. New sounds and musical aesthetics can emerge.
Ende November nahm ich an dem Sound & Vision 4 Konzert für Musik und Medientechnologie an der Anton Bruckner Universität mit meiner Installation "Sound Drawings" teil. Die Sound & Vision Konzertreihe gibt Musikern und Audio-visuellen Programmieren die Möglichkeit ihre neuen experiementellen Klangwelten und Visualisierungen der Öffentlichkeit zu präsentieren.
Plakat
Programm Flyer Seite 1
Programm Flyer Seite 2
Bei meiner Installation "Sound Drawings" zeichnen Musiker mit Hilfe ihrer Instrumente ein abstraktes Farbenbild von harmonisch schwingenden Linien. Die Tonhöhe und die Lautstärke lässt den digitalen Pinsel an verschiedenen Positionen an der Leinwand gleiten. Die Installation versucht die ästhetischen Erfahrungen zwischen musikalischer und visueller Wahrnehmung auf ein gleichberechtigtes Level zuheben. Normalerweise gibt die Musik den Ton für die Visualisierung, oder und umgehkehrt. Durch das visuelle in Echtzeit generierte Feedback entsteht für die Musiker eine neue Improvisationserfahrungen. Diese neue Erfahrung beeinflusst die Interaktion zwischen den Musikern zusätzlich, und verändert somit die musikalische Ästhetik. Read more...
Last semester I joined the Journal Club lecture at our University. I continued my research in gesture based interaction for screen-based environments. This little paper research was based on the question how the screen size influences the gesture design. In the end I created a short presentation about important conferences for gesture design, and summarized the results of 4 papers. Thanks to Martin Kaltenbrunner for his useful advices!
Furthermore, I found a bunch of very interesting papers for designing gestures in screen-based environments. I want to share these papers with you. You are welcome to add comments about the papers or recommend other nice projects! (use the tooltip for only reading the titles of the papers)
Read more...
For several months I worked on technical paper about designing gestures for screen-based environments. Finally, it is finished and you can read it. Here is the abstract:
This paper analyses gesture design for pointing devices in screen-based environments. By exploring design patterns the analysis investigated the gesture design of five different end-user products: Desktop operating systems, mobile operating systems, 3rd Party software, small software products, and common hardware products. The beginning of the paper defines what a gesture is, and the various kinds of gestures. Afterwards the analysis merges the gesture design results with the basic commands for pointing devices. This approach points out which gestures are often used, and in which context they are used. The results give interaction designers and software engineers a guide for implementing gestures in their own products. Furthermore, the paper proposes solutions for gesture documentation, and a conceptual framework for complicated gestures. The last section takes an industrial design perspective on pointing devices as an input channel. It discusses the evolution of interface design from a hardware driven to a software driven approach.
Please note:
Unfortunately, I got sick on a long-term disease. Therefore it took me so long for writing this paper and that is also the reason why the data of the analysis is from January of 2010. However, in my opinion the results of my analysis are still valid. For more up-to-date data, please check the Touch Gesture Reference from LukeW.
Acknowledgement:
I am very happy about the support from my teachers, friends, and fellow students. Big thanks to Mahir M. Yavuz and Mathias Stäbler for the content feedback. Vesela Mihaylova for a great Adobe Illustrator and graphic design support. Tim Devine for transforming over 30 pages of my bad english in a readable form, and marking some unclear points of my paper. Dudes, thank you so much!
Download
The book Designing Interaction from Bill Moggridge was already published in 2006. Even it is quite old for a technology book the content is still valid. The first six chapters give a perfect history background of human-computer interaction. The evolution of input devices and the computer itself is very good explained. Also the original comments from the designers and engineers are very interesting to read. In the end the reader gets a very good introduction how and why the computer evolved as it is today. Even the described history is a strongly based on the authors view. The chapters Adopting Technology and Multisensory and Multimedia gives a nice introduction into tangible interaction. It also helps beginners to understand how to leave the desktop metaphor. The whole book describes very easily how product designer, industrial designer, psychologist and engineers working together for developing the new devices. The texts about their development and thinking processes gives a very good insight. The last chapters about The Internet, Futures and Alternatives Nows, and People and Prototypes are nice to read, but with some comments I can't agree. For this reason, the aspects of Emotional Design and Prototyping are little bit weak in my opinion. However, reading the first six chapters is very useful for human-computer interaction beginners. It makes their knowledge around the history of Interaction Design more stable. The last chapters are nice to read, but not very obligatory. Unfortunately, the multimedia CD of the book I never really checked. So I can't say if it is good or not. For professional interaction designer is almost nothing new in this book, so I can't recommend it for them.
