Not only that, both teams presented at SIGGRAPH and won 2nd place! Amazing. Check out the Vimeo reel below, HT to Ayaka Ito for putting together the video. Shout out to SociaLaser and the RIT community!

Cheers,

- John Barbagallo

Yes I know, it’s been a while since we’ve last updated the blog so our apologies if we’ve fallen off the face of the earth.

Anywho, there’s some exciting news in the world of surface-top interactive installations. Reactable, a musical table-top instrument is now up for presale in Europe — pretty amazing stuff! We’ve had our eye on this dynamic musical table since the birth of our first Sociable Table prototype. The team at Reactable uses their own open source technology for fiducial tracking, dubbed reacTIVision, which is open source. Our table implements the same back-end tracking engine.

Check out some of these videos from their past exhibitions:

• http://vimeo.com/9596679
• http://vimeo.com/1691337
• http://vimeo.com/1120278

Stay tuned for more news.

Our team won one of four $1,000 prizes that were to be given to the most creative exhibit in the festival. We also received the Marge Ruffing Memorial Award, a prize given to the exhibit that displays what RIT is all about — meshing the left and right sides of the brain, including the hospitality aspect of the exhibit.

We’d like to thank everyone who supported Sociable, including Jason Sauers who designed and fabricated the table itself. Check out some of the pictures below — there are more to come so be sure to check back!

My apologies for some blurriness and noise in the images below, the room was dark and I was shooting RAW at a very low ISO.

Getting a camera to do am adequate job of capturing our diffuse infrared light has been a nightmare. The loaner Sony TRV22, while a reasonably featured product, does not offer non-interlaced output and runs on non-square pixels. As interlacing tears a fiducial into many smaller components, this is simply not workable and looks to be unfixable. Other HDcams are being investigated, but carry a cost far beyond any reasonable budget this team could afford. Cheap webcams are often the product of interest for this field, but they fail to offer the resolution and framerate necessary to get the job done.

Enter the “Sony Playstation 3 Eye,” a cheap USB camera designed to extend the functionality of its parent console by giving it a new range of audio and video inputs to work with. All of that is basically unnecessary, though. What matters is that a very talented someone, AlexP, has managed to write a comprehensive driver set providing full support for this device on the Windows platform. Unfortunately for us, the host of this file is MIA with no sign of returning in the near future. If anyone viewing this happens to know where a copy of the latest version can be found (or simply has one archived somewhere), a reply in the comments would be appreciated.

While the camera continues to be a point of trouble, it is far from our only hickup. Projector Limbo has hit the project. While our existing projector, an NEC WT-615, is remarkably functional and a solid performer, its reflected mirror configuration does not suit our light path. If we stick with it, the table will need to be widened by nearly a foot and a half just to allow it to fit, and the nature of this light makes folding the optics somewhat difficult. A new option must be found soon. A detailed list of options will soon be posted up for some text-based brainstorming.

That’s it for now, folks. I’ll follow up on this soon enough with a much more detailed post when time allows. Keep your eyes peeled!

This way we could have a bartender at the end of the table and fit multiple users around it. Now we are onto talking to our extremely helpful industrial designer who will be helping us build the table itself. Updates soon to come!

Luke’s comp:

He went with Sam’s background with the boxes and played around a lot with the cup interface, trying to come up with other visually interesting solutions than just a button popping up. He also changed the roulette so it stood out from the rest.

Sam’s comp:

He played around with the buttons, trying to imitate a card look, as if cards were thrown out on the table. He also played around with avatars and what they would look like interacting.

Ayaka’s comp:

Ayaka played around with a 3d floor to the table, so that it gives more depth to the table and we could animate within that space. She also used Sam’s background but played with the colors. She also was experimenting with avatars, thinking they could be 3d as well if they are in a 3d space.

My comp:

With this comp, I played with having textured animtions around the cup rather than just an ambience. I also played with the avatars trying to make them more like iconic, elegant, light rays, rather than a more literal person. Also I started to think about what they could do to be more useful. What if they were the lightning bolt between people rather than having a lightning bolt seperate?  I tried to incorporate Luke’s buttons to around the interface, and played with making the roulette looking different from the rest of the cup interfaces.

Round five coming up at the end of Week 1!

Alex’s comp
our avatars are possibly too cartoony
simple small avatars, swooshing lightning to resemble interactions
menu choices should face user – so as not to be blocked by glass
cup ornamentation gives a lot of personality

Ayaka’s comp
depth layers
avatars floating between cups & bg
avatar movement btwn cups causes avatars to spin around
depth of layers can be used with roulette – sinking into bg

Sam’s comp
round roulette doesn’t work with grid design
card ideas are interesting
satellite around cup can be used to contain menu until opened
larger bg tiles divide when focusing on certain objects

GENERAL NOTES:

putting cup in roulette may not be best for usability
putting cup in center may be superficial
roulette may be far from certain users
hemisphere shape may be an issue
use different locations to allow different people access
bartender is not involved- roulette can be further away from his/her end

roulette transformation with new activities
ambient in appearance, becomes brighter and more pronounced when cup placed
roulette randomly spinning to choose a game, unless cup rotated to choose

Join Game display text
scrolling ticker around border
background ambience can become focused on text choice around cup

cup rotation under-used?
simple menu rotation is probably satisfactory

WTF game
A / B choice – WTF / FTW

get rid of avatars? – they have become simplified to the point of being basically unnecessary
incorporate avatar traits into cup ambience
simplify them (as in Alex’s comp)
use ambient little beings like fl0w which develop w/ more communication

TEAM NOTES:

Imagine RIT
carport (tent cover)
bartender serving juices
bouncer & red velvet rope

Have meeting schedules placed on BaseCamp every week
time / date / location / agenda

All presentations should be prepared at prior meeting

Tuesday  2-24-09  12:00  T.C Rileys  w/ Adam Smith

SPRING SCHEDULE:

Week 1
everyone upload schedule by Monday night
table v2 prototype working – Andrew
communicate with Jason for final table design
comps v4 DUE
redesign of the blog – Ayaka

Week 2
all current development traits working; games; cup ambiences; bg (“a mostly working thing that looks like crap”)
design for the final table (Jason)
comps v5

Week 3
comp v6 (single version)

Week 4
final table built
final design comp
completely working development

Week 5
Asset management

Week 6
Asset management
bug testing

Week 7
Asset management
bug testing

Week 8 DUE

—these notes can also be downloaded at:

http://cias.rit.edu/~nmtp/nmtp/team8track/Design%20Deliverables%202-21-09.rtf

—