Minor Interactive Environments 2012-2013
The Interactive Environments minor is a shared initiative by the faculties of Architecture, Industrial Design, and Computer Science, involving the research groups Hyperbody (A), ID-StudioLab (ID), and Embedded Software group (EEMCS). The Science Centre of the TU Delft hosts the minor in a dedicated laboratory space.

• To get an impression of the installations that were developed in the three previous years, please select the student projects from the navigation menu.
• The Minor will be offered to TU Delft BSc students from all faculties
• An anonymous survey was recently conducted by the TU among our former students. The Minor was evaluated on several criteria and we received a rating of 8.3 on a 10-point scale.

SoundScape installation for TEDxDelft 2011 gives a new definition to furniture by its interactive relation with the users.

Introduction
The Interactive Environments minor offers an exciting five-month ride through interactive architecture: students learn new technologies at every scale, interact with inspiring guest speakers and take part in a visionary and challenging course-length project. Students will be full-time engaged in exploring the possibilities of multimodal, whole body interaction, working with new design methods, input devices, dynamic actuators, high-tech materials and rapid prototyping tools. Students apply their knowledge and skills in a real-life project, from the development of a concept to the creation of a full-scale experiential prototype.

The course structure of the Interactive Environments Minor is built around a group project assignment of an interactive social space, built up from autonomously operating smart building components. Groups of 5 students are assigned to design, fabricate and build a fully operational complex spatial interactive installation. All courses within the minor are geared towards supporting this goal in a variety of ways. The design assignment includes the design of interaction scenarios, and the integration of its embedded computing technologies.

IF YOU’RE READY TO TAKE UP THE CHALLENGE, JOIN THE INTERACTIVE ENVIRONMENTS MINOR!

Ecology of light sensing and emitting creatures built in the 3-day workshop with Ruairi Glynn | Interactive Environments minor 2010

Course Structure
Students work in groups on a design assignment throughout the semester. The semester is split into three phases. First is the conceptualization phase including the learning of required skills to develop concepts for interactive environments, in the second phase the prototype will be built and in the final phase the prototype and it’s behavior will be evaluated and fine-tuned.
Students will employ a highly iterative design process in which design ideas are verified by making prototypes and testing these. In this way design ideas mature into a meaningful concept. Students will also be working with Computer Aided Manufacturing techniques eg. a file-to-factory design process where the final concept will be 3D-modeled parametrically, which will serve as the input for the production drawings for the CNC machines. In addition, to construct the final prototype the design will be made up of multiple components in which interactive systems and wiring should be integrated.
The Science Centre (SC) of the TU Delft hosts the minor and gives the students access to its facilities for the duration of the master. Among these: a unique design studio, workshop and brainstorm room. In return the students expose their process and (intermediate) results to the public of the SC by means of verbal explanations, demonstrations and through exhibiting presentation material and intermediate prototypes.
The kickoff event for the minor is a visit to the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz Austria. The interactive art festival is organized in the beginning of September so in coincides with the start of the semester. The festival is the main European event on interactive media art with interactive installations, performances and events relevant to the minor. In addition, during the visit staff and students have the chance to get to know each other.

• Course description: Design strategies (3 ECTS): The design strategies course is a lecture series that aims to identify theory, method or practice relevant to the minor design assignment. Topics span the fields of architecture, interaction design and affective computing. The lectures will provide references to reading material about the topics and students are expected to research the topic beyond the material presented in the lecture. Examples of topics are: experience design, interactive architecture, introduction to Arduino, Design and Emotion. Assessment is based on an individual essay (2xA4), about the application of one of the topics in the final concept. Students receive an individual grade. The course runs throughout the semester the essay is due as a deliverable at the end of the semester.
• Course description: Interaction studies (3 ECTS): This course runs in the first two weeks of the minor. Interaction studies is a series of examinations of existing interactive projects. Students work in groups on a critical analysis of a relevant interactive project and present their observations. A presentation is constructed from at least a desktop analysis but ideally also from actually visiting (observation and interacting) with the installation, maybe even interviewing people involved with the project. This course aims to create awareness of existing work in the field as well as some insight into the development process of interactive installations. There are many aspects of such a process that can be investigated eg. aesthetics, use of technology, finances, project organization, research motivation, interaction design. Assessment is based on the quality of the analysis and presentation. Students work in groups, presenting in turn and receive a group grade.
• Course description: Technical Studies (6 ECTS): The technical studies course aims to introduce the required skills for making interactive environments, such as: working with embedded microcontrollers, electronics, programming, parametric modeling and affective computing. Students work in small groups on practical assignments that are introduced and elaborated with lectures. Assessment is based on the quality of the delivered work: an interactive prototype, a 3D model, etc.
• Course description: Embedded Networked Systems for Spatial Interactions (6 ECTS): This course addresses the concepts of embedded systems and large-scale networks in the context of spatial interactions. After successfully completing this course, the student will understand the concepts of large-scale embedded networks, spatial computing and distributed interaction. This course employs the following teaching methods: Lectures and practicum, and Literature and Study Materials. Assessment is based on the ability to design and use large networks of embedded devices for creating interactive systems.
• Course description: Workshops (3 ECTS): The course workshops and lectures provide both hands-on and theoretical inspiration to feed the main design assignment. Assessment of this course is a group grade combined with the assessment of the course design and prototyping studio (see below). The course runs during the full semester.
• Course description: Design and prototyping studio (9 ECTS): The course design and prototyping studio is the main design track in the minor. Students work in groups on the main design assignment. Assessment is based on the quality of the concept, quality of the prototype and presentation. The course runs during the full semester.

Minor Learning objectives

• The student can employ a design-by-making approach to the development of concepts interactive products/environments
• The student can apply innovative and creative design thinking and build processes using computational design techniques
• The student can validate design outcomes through strategies of parametric design and methods of digital fabrication
• The student can demonstrate design outcomes to the general public
• The student can identify appropriate interactive technologies and implement a prototype with interactive behavior.
• The student will understand the concepts of large-scale embedded networks, spatial computing and distributed interaction.

Modii’s initial design was to keep the amount of visitors of the two other installations in Baai2 balanced; it distributes people to one of the other the installation that requires interaction. Modii is equipped with four interactive primitive ‘organisms’ that follow up on each other. The installation draws attention to lure you in. Therefore the first ‘organism’ has a very open personality. With the lowest interaction it will open up for you. The second module will turn on, it is more fun and interested in keeping you in. A third one will try to point you to the way out and the last will provide you with a reason to move on to the next installation.

The modularity of the doorway contributes to it’s function; the larger amount of people it will have to transport from left to right and vice versa, the larger the doorway will have to be. A parametric design was made in Grasshopper to fulfill this modularity, so that with only one mouse click another shape is created.

What you see in the picture above, is one of the many ribs which needed to be laser cutted out of 4 mm hardwood triplex. Because of the size of the lasercutter, we used plates of 60 * 30 cm. Our first plan was to use another, smaller laser cutter. Later on, this intended laser cutter wasn’t available, so we had to change plans. The wood was already sawed for de dimensions of the unavailable laser cutter, so we couldn’t use the full size of this new lasercutter.

In the end this wasn’t much of a problem because the wood was bending and working a lot. So if these plates would have been larger, this effect would have occurred much more. With the size of 30*60 cm’s, we already had to spray them with a water spray gun on the convex surface, in order to get the plates more straight to lie on de flat surface of the laser cutter. This is very important for the result of your lasered product. The laser in the machine has a focus on a specific height. So depending on your material thickness you can move the surface on which your material is laid a bit up and down to make sure the focus of the laser is exactly in de middle of your material. If you do this right, clean cuts are made, you don’t have to go over your material a second time so this saves you a lot of time. Off course one would understand that when your material is bended a little, this effect doesn’t work out quite fine.

So when the material is laid in properly and the laser is focussed on the material, you only need to upload your autocad drawing via the laser cutters print driver and wait for some time and watch closely if everything is going right. It takes some experience before you know the exact right settings for your material. In the beginning we had to go over the material two or three times, in the end only one. In total we had to print 422 ribs,  each rib containing 2 hardwood triplex sub-ribs. With an average of 8 of these sub ribs per sheet, and 25 minutes per sheet, one could imagine there is quite some time and material invested in this installation.

Another time intensive job. What you see here is the milling machine working on one part of the ribs. As said before, every ribs consists of 2 hardwood triplex plates (4mm) and also 4 little plates of MDF wood (6mm) these are respectively the so called outer and inner ribs. Since we had 422 and every rib containing 4 inner ribs, again one can imagine the amount of work. We used 7  plates of 244*122 cm mdf 6 mm plates. Luckily enough this is a standard machine and factory size, so we didn’t had to do any preparation work for this part of the production. It took the milling machine around 3 hours per plate to finish. Afterwards the plate had to be cleaned with a vacuum cleaner, every part tagged with a code from the computer model and then put into boxes and brought back to the science centre where it would be assembled. We used the second week of the Christmas vacation to mill and laser from 7 Am to 10 Pm, 15 hours a day!

After the inner ribs, we had to mill the inner and outer circles as well. This can be seen in the next picture, where the larger circle of each cone is to be called the outer circle, the smaller one the inner circle. For these circles we used 6 plates of the same 6 mm MDF wood and because of the larger shapes that had to be milled it took around 1.5 hour to finish a plate of this kind. We used Rhino Nest to calculate the ideal orientation and lay out of each plate filled with parts. We couldn’t use this for the outer triplex wood ribs, because we had to take the grain into account over which the parts would be aggravated.

Due to our planning we first milled the inner ribs, along with the lasering of the outer ribs, so they could be assembled when milling the circles, which would be added later on in the assembly process.

In this picture you can see a very nice view of the just described parts, all assembled into a frame of a cone. We used deuvels and glue to merge the 6 pieces of each rib together, keeping pressure on the package with some elastics. The assembling was done by 7 team members and 2 extra friends 2 days long. When all the 96 cones were assembled and stacked on to each other, we waited for the glue to be dry. When they reached this state, some of them had to be changed into a different rib coordination. Luckily enough we had our drawings from our parametric model to search for mistakes and repair them. The cones that were assembled in the right way, were then painted and laid to dry. First a layer of ground paint, and afterwards a black shiny finish on both sides of each cone.

It’s quite an astonishing look when you see the installation rising from all the individual parts. Planning in this part of the process is really essential, as well as communication. When some small tolerances weren’t taken into account, this is the moment you have to deal with these bad results. That’s why it is really important that there is always a test unit produced and assembled, before you can assume that the whole batch will be correct.

When they were all dry, we started making the cones wraps. These were made out of 0.8 mm triplex which can be bended really easily when obtaining the correct grain direction. These wraps were milled, then folded around their corresponding cone and glued together with a small rectangle of the same triplex wood. These also had to dry, so in the end we would have the cones frame and their wrap. The result is shown in the other pictures.

Before we painted all the cones when done assembling, we build it up entirely to test all the connections, rib configuration and strength. How a model is made in the computer can differ a lot with how it’s build in the end. For example, when set up, due to the working wood, we had a margin of around 1.5 meter between the 2 walls. The installation seemed to held it, but one knows that there will be a lot of uncalculated tensions in the material when de model isn’t placed correctly. That is why in the end we placed some silicon strips under the cones that were situated on the ground, in order to keep de walls at the right distance of each other.

Because we didn’t had the 0.8 mm triplex assembled in the first build up of the installation, we used small pieces of wood to imitate the 1.6 mm space between the cones. If this wouldn’t be done, in the roof of the installation some connections could differ around 10 cm. In order to balance the wall when it reached the covering part, we used a rope attached to the framework that was build in the interior of the Science Centre.
Another advantage of building the installation in the test phase, is that you learn a lot about it. There were some tolerances and things that weren’t foreseen while designing the model on the computer. For example, some cones were too small to stick a pen through the connection holes, some other cones broke under the pressure of the whole and had to be redesigned. Some cones only had 1 rib and were therefore very unstable. And as said before, if a configuration of a set of ribs in a cones isn’t correct, this is the moment when you acknowledge that. If we wouldn’t have done that, we would have had to re wrap the 0.8 mm triplex cones inside out, leaving very nasty glue marks on the new outside. That is also why you should always order some extra material so that you can make these mistakes and learn from them.

In this picture you can see all the cones assembled with their corresponding wrap around them. Now all that had to be done is the assembly of the entire installation so that the electronics could be applied. This is one of the moments where you can really enjoy your work so far and it starts to pay off in astonishing looks and feels. When all the wraps are glued the right way, the milled holes in the wraps should correspond to the holes from the ribs in the framework. As far as we were here we assumed that it was just a matter of implementing the electronics and we would be done. Unfortunately this didn’t went as we had expected.
When we had built the test setting for the modules that would later one be placed in the installation, everything looked fine. Working sensors, corresponding feedback in the software and programmable thresholds for the right reactions of the motors and EL wires. When we putted al the cables through the installation in the final phase, the pulling sensors where constantly triggered, letting a module think someone is near all the time. This was very unlucky for the interaction as it wouldn’t work as expected. So our last phase was primarily about making sense of the interaction that we could manage. If we would make a version 2.0, a lot that was learned during the first version could be used.

For example, the cones work as a sound reflection box, unintended. When you use ultra sound sensors to detect a person, the readings from these sensors are very disturbed. A positive thing we did not thought of in the design was that the sounds which are produced by the motors give the entire installation a certain character. We knew that the sound would be there, but we didn’t expected it to be so dominant. It turned out that the reflective quality of the cones worked as a enforcing value for the experience of the inside of the installation which was designed as a intimate space. Now with the sounds stronger as expected, the inside became more intimate and astonishing due to the moving parts and corresponding sounds.

When all electronics and cables were ready to be installed we had to think of a way to reach the top of the installation. Before we came up with a plan, Jesse allready took some pipes down from the pipe rack and build his very own bridge, which came in handy because with cabling the installation hours were spent on top of it.

The final exposure (for the minor that is) of our installation was at the IDE faculty. We split our installation into 3 big pieces, all fully equipped with lots of electronics, but we had to be even more careful with the wrapping. We needed a day to disconnect the electronica and cones and prepare for transportation. In only two hours the installation was moved from science center to IDE, and yet another half a day was needed for building it up again. Luckily, we tagged every single piece in a structured way. So for example, we tagged the plastic plates not only per cone, but also for the way it needed to be placed.

What did people think of it? What did we learn?

Future plans

With the veneer around the cones and the inside painted black, it has got a magical touch as if there’s no inside and the cones are connected the same way igloo’s are build up.

As I write this blogpost, the two modules are being tested. We ran into some slight communication problems, but when it comes to electronics we have the best of the best; Jesse and Samuel.

Last week was a week of quick but professional solutions. How are we going to connect the veneer? With an extra strip of veneer. How are we going to keep the wires connected to the ground? With ‘spacers’, custom designed specialist cast iron components (some people call it car junk).

So, two modules can ‘already’ react on your presence, read pull sensors and shine like the sun. While some interaction is applied to these modules, the third and fourth ones are on their way up. Wednesday is a whole day for interaction design. We realize we’re on a tight schedule so all manpower is being used.

You’re all invited to the exposition in the ID faculty, next week.

A week ago we built up the entire structure in 3 pieces; two walls and the roof. We made sure every cone was right and we didn’t miss any pieces.

Secondly, we disassembled Modii and started painting the inside and outside of the cones black. Each cone needed a finish of veneer that covers up the wooden base structure.

Right now the last cones are being painted, the last veneer gets bended into its conical shape. When we finish the 96th, we can take it to the next level. That means assembling Modii for the second time and do one last check to make sure no parts need to be laser-cut or milled all over again.

Jesse en Samuel have been working simultaneously and isolated form the rest of us. Great improvements have been made electronic-wise; the pull-sensors, motors (sponsored motor drivers from DamenCNC) and EL-wires work perfectly well right now. Still, the electronics need to be installed, code needs to be written and our interaction design needs testing and fine-tuning. This will all happen in the weekend and coming week.

We are very excited and can’t wait till the paint and glue dries, so that we can bring you Modii in its full glory.

Pleas check our Flickr account for more photos and see you next time

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UECm7gobiI4

Video made by Thijs van der Lely

FORM: Some people found the space inside the installation easy to walk in, they like the fact that it had outside and inside viewing angles. The white white rings were found to be subtle yet clinical, some links to hospital apparats were proposed.Others were intrigued by the organic properties and compared it to an alien plant or tree. We had some comments on the fact that you could stare at it for long periods of time and be entertained. Some people didnt like randomness of nets, and were expecting more of a pattern. A recurring remark was on the lack of real entrance, a problem we foresaw.

SOCIAL ASPECT: Some users commented on the clear tubes and how they enabled you to actually see other users users, they recognised that people are brought to a meeting point where two “fluid messages” meet as you are following it. They thought it was fun to make (personal) patterns. Others did not see how social interactivity would be triggered at all.

MEANING: many different guesses, but most were too vague and general. Lots of “wow”s and “fascinating”s, also many references to organisms and nature. However the actual meaning that we intended was not entirely conveyed.

INTERACTION: This part was tricky because the interface wasn’t fully functional, we got numerous comments on this. Other remarks were quite varied. People found the shape of the touchpads appealing and inviting. One person suggested use of a webcam for added fun. Some people imagined the fun you could have cooperating to fill up the net with color entirely, Others simply complained about the sound of the motors. A single person did not understand where the interaction should take place, however this was probably due tue the lack of blinking lights in the touchpads.

And finally a small video of how the day went !

The main question we had was about the telescope within the inflatable. We were wondering if it was either too short or too heavy to go all the way up to the point of the object. Our conclusion is that there is too much friction in the lowest two parts of the telescope, which makes it too heavy for the inflatable to carry it all the way up.

Modii Presentation 23-12-’11

For now, this is the best solution, just download the wetransfer file. We’re working on a way to get all the slides visible on this blog.

Merry X-mas

&

Happy NY

If you need us, we’ll be at the Science Center.