Due: Before class 10/16

Make an initial pitch for a final project that you would like to pursue for class.  This pitch is meant to articulate the high-level aspects of the project.  We will do a refined project pitch in a few weeks that will dive into the details of the project.

Final projects must:

1. Your project must be interactive.
   This means your project cannot be a series of blinking lights. It must respond to user actions in some way.
2. Your project must be wearable.
   This means it must be able to affixed to the user when they are mobile.
3. Your project must be functional.
   Course projects are meant to be prototypes or proof of concepts of larger ideas. Projects should be able to demonstrate their intended purpose.

In your pitch you should:

1. Describe what you want to do
2. Whether you want to work in a team or as an individual
3. What aspects of the project you feel confident about and what aspects you feel less confident about
4. One piece of concept art (a sketch, a photo, etc)

Choose the Projects for the posting category.

A popular and attractive application of wearable computing are garments with programmable visuals, realized using display technology such as LEDs. Programming such visuals is currently done at a low level, by writing microcontroller programs that control the activation of individual display elements. This approach lacks scalability – programming becomes progressively more unwieldy as the number of display elements increases. It is also ill-suited for implementing complex visual patterns that activate sychronously across multiple garments – when each garment has its own, separately programmed microcontroller, synchronizing visuals on multiple garments is a challenge. Finally, the approach is not particularly intuitive, as there is a disconnect between how display elements are accessed during programming (using pin numbers) and their logical groupings and physical locations on the garment.

I propose adapting some of the tools and workflows traditionally employed in computer animation to the problem of programming wearable visuals. I envision a system that allows authoring of animated visuals on multiple garments in a single place – a graphical animation tool on your PC. The lighting of many display elements across one or more garments could be programmed visually and using a much smaller set of logical parameters. For instance, imagine a shirt with an array of LEDs on the front and the designer wants to light them up in a pulsating heart shape. The designer could define a single animation parameter called “ShirtHeartShape” that maps to the pins of all those LEDs, keyframe its value at different times, and use interpolating curves to achieve a nice, pulsating effect. The designer could also author arbitrarily complex visuals across multiple garments by synchronously animating multiple such parameters. Most of the complexity, both in terms of algorithms and creative effort, would happen in the animation tool. There would be no need to program microcontrollers on individual garments – their only task would be to receive time-indexed animation frames (pin values) from the animation tool and realize the visuals by applying the frame values to appropriate pins.

As a further extension, I also propose an intuitive method for selecting which display elements should be controlled by a particular animation parameter. The idea is to scan the garment using a camera in order to obtain its image, and perform automatic registration to determine the pin numbers and physical locations of all display elements. The designer could then define the parameter mapping by using a sketch-based method (an equivalent of Photoshop lasso tool) to select a subset of LEDs directy on the image of the garment, and the system would automatically extract their pin numbers and compute the mapping.

This is a project that I’ve been thinking for a while, and its kind of expensive but can be really useful in cold days. It is a multimedia jacket to basically control your smartphone through Bluetooth and Arduino.

This coat would have headphones, a microphone, an accelerometer, a gyroscope,  and a LCD that would be used to pass some basic information to the user. In addition to those features you could use discrete solar panels on the shoulders to recharge the batteries of your Arduino and even  track some basic accidents measuring pressure in key regions of your jacket.

The challenges that people might face in this project would be:
– Solar panels are expensive.
– How to determine that the user is in danger.
– How to efficiently use the solar panels to recharge the batteries.

I was thinking about this project during  the last two weeks. It’s about a glove that can be used to play computer games that requires the user to press a limited number of buttons, like Q,W,E or R. It could be adjusted to work with another combination of buttons, in fact. Basically, you would not need a keyboard to play and could use any surface to press the buttons.

This project could be famous and pretty useful among MOBA players like League of Legends and Defense Of The Ancients (DOTA). With these special gloves you can play using a  TV as a monitor and a table as keyboard, for example. As a challenge I think that would be a little hard to configure the Bluetooth plate and create an interface to computers that interact with Lilypad and work properly.