Designing a Physical Telepresence Device
Design and develop a physical telepresence installation of wirelessly connected large-scale inflatables placed within the UNCC campus or more specifically Storrs building that will enable visitors in each site to physically experience the presence of visitors in other remote sites, questioning our perception of locality, belongingness, and social identity. While there are many communication options and protocols, we will focus on connecting devices through the internet using WiFi.
Research Focus
My aim is to investigate design of participatory systems that allow any possible type of relationship –human-to-human, object-to-object, human-to-object, and object-to-human– in using inflatables using puppets.
Precedents study
1. A monumental interactive sculpture in the sky. Choreographed by visitors in real time through their mobile devices, the sculpture is a crowd-controlled visual artwork on a giant, floating canvas from Janet Echelman.
2. AnyPixel is an open-source software and hardware library that makes it possible to use the web to create big, unusual, interactive displays out of all kinds of things.
Cell Phone Puppets: Turning Mobile Phones into Performing Objects: The paper is about utilizing a mobile phone motion control system to control puppets in a tactile way. Using mobile devices into tangible interfaces with traditional puppetry, the paper discusses the connections between these domains.
1.Stage application at work; lower menu presents stage director options; both puppets are controlled by players.
2.Android app: selecting a control scheme (left) and puppet customization (right).
3.Single phone control scheme; movements are directly projected onto the puppet body.
System Design
Design and Fabrication of Inflatables
Step wise process of fabrication of inflatables is shows below.
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Attach multiples modules of Inflatables together to make it as a AirMuscle. Design and fabrication process is shown below.
Step 4
One protective measure which was taken for the inflatables from breaking apart was to introduce air-values in them. It helps to escape the excess air from the Inflatable.
Photos showing the inflated stages of Inflatabes when sealed together
Below are the photos and videos of the dynamic behavior of the Inflatables.
User Study
Once done with the fabrication and testing of the Inflatable I did the user study to understand the accomplishment of my project .
Used approached and interacted with the Inflatables in different ways.
1. Few users were trying to control the same section of the inflatable
2. Few users started inflating seeing someone inflating other inflatable, which shows that it was an collaborative effort from participants to inflate or deflate.
3. Few participants gave feedback that it would be nice to see it in architectural space, which can change depending on users need.
4. Few participants said that it would also be nice if it can used for Data-physicalization, which could be used in public opinion, they said they would like to see an array of 100s of these inflatables and they could it for voting and polls.
We conducted unstructured interviews with visitors on our installation site. Some visitors found the inflatables to resemble waving inflatable tube men while others found their shape to have a soft huggable appeal. We found interactions including people competing each other, pranking each other and working together to inflate and deflate Pneuxels. We found people asking loudly “who is turning them off?” form one side and people from other sides sometimes answering “I am.” We envision similar kind of interaction in which remotely located people are linked or affected by each other via Pneuxels.
Summary and Foundation for Future Research
I plan a wide range of future applications for AirMuscle platform:
1. We plan on using the motion sensors of the cell phone to move the puppets.
2. We plan on installing on-site sensors (proximity, sound, vision) to implicitly activate PneuPuppetry based on human movement so that the puppet can replicate the movement of people.
3. We also consider metaphorical ways of activating PneuPuppetry such as allowing people to blow air into their cell phone's microphone (a Machine Learning algorithm can be trained to recognize the sound of a breath and translate it to control the speed of fan) and that can inflate parts of puppets body and actuate it.
4. Developing a simulation for creating specific actuators for specific motion in puppets and then developing an autonomous fabrication method is also in our plans.
5. Moreover, we plan on improving the current system by adding radio communication, which is more efficient in distributed network systems in remote locations compared to Wi-Fi communication, which depends on hotspots and locations are more bounded by WIFI coverage.
6. Other future explorations we plan include combining PneuPuppetry in gaming situations in which people will compete, either in groups or individually with different puppets, creating different types of playful or strategic interactions.
7. Finally, we plan on using PneuPuppetry as a physical visualization medium, to physically manifest real time data.