Project #10.3 Devel­op­ing Social Controllers

Demo

Abstract

Many forms of tech­nol­ogy have been ori­ented at con­nect­ing peo­ple together. We were inter­ested in how cheap, hand­held, elec­tronic devices might be used to pro­mote social inter­ac­tions, thereby cre­at­ing “social con­trollers”. Many tech­no­log­i­cal, artis­tic, and inter­face chal­lenges are pre­sented by this goal, though other projects point out some of the solutions.

Through brain­storm­ing, we decided to use elec­tronic music and sound cre­ation as the medium for cre­at­ing inter­ac­tion. We also decided on a fixed set of sen­sors (2 but­tons, one slider, and a light detec­tor) to con­trol the sound syn­the­siz­ing algo­rithms. We used Max/MSP, Pro­cess­ing with Minim, the Mini-Simius Card, and ana­log cir­cuitry to cre­ate pro­to­types. A group of testers eval­u­ated the pro­to­types for inter­est and enjoy­ment. After decid­ing to use a dsPIC micro­con­troller, we also decided that the devices would con­tain five highest-rated pro­to­types, since the nature of the device could be changed by sim­ply chang­ing the sound mod­ule. At all points, enjoy­ment was the main goal, and other con­sid­er­a­tions were sec­ondary. We fab­ri­cated six social con­trollers, using a com­puter mouse as the form fac­tor, and replac­ing the inter­nal com­po­nents with our own PCB and components.

The final social con­troller, called the Lara, is a respon­sive, enjoy­able, mul­ti­modal sound device which pro­motes social inter­ac­tion through LEDs and light sen­sors with sur­pris­ing and enter­tain­ing results.

Doc­u­ments

  • [2010,inproceedings] bib­tex Go to document
    Mills III John Ander­son, Rebousière Loïc, Chessini Bose Ricardo, « Devel­op­ing Social Con­trollers », in « QPSR of the nume­di­art research pro­gram », 2010, pp. 37–43.
    @INPROCEEDINGS{numediart_2010_s11_p1_report,
      author = {John~Anderson Mills~III and Lo\"{i}c Rebousi\`{e}re and Ricardo Chessini~Bose},
      title = {Developing Social Controllers},
      booktitle = {{QPSR} of the numediart research program},
      year = {2010},
      editor = {Thierry Dutoit and Beno\^{i}t Macq},
      volume = {3},
      number = {3},
      pages = {37-43},
      month = {9},
      organization = {numediart Research Program on Digital Art Technologies},
      url = {http://www.numediart.org/docs/numediart_2010_s11_p1_report.pdf}
    }