eye tee pea

The final Arduino code can be found here, and photo documentation is below.

lives here.

these are the images we ended up using:

image a

image b

image c

image d

i placed a bit of text that instructs the user to place a cube on the tray to begin the interaction. which is well and good, except that it stays there after cubes are placed on the tray, disappearing only if a cube is placed over a part of the tray where the text is, replacing it with the image projected onto the cube.

in icm class i was advised to program different game states, so that as soon as a cube is placed on the tray (i.e. when the “game starts”) the instructional text disappears.

i sought help from thomas on how to do this, and he talked me through the basic logic. so i went home and tried it, with a scaled down version of what i needed it to do. here is the test that i successfully managed. i know it seems like a simple thing, but i cannot tell you how chuffed i was when i got it to work.

the screen is divided into four, so to try it, hold your mouse over the 1st quarter, press and hold the q key; then move the mouse over the 2nd quarter, press and hold the w key; 3rd quarter - e key and 4th quarter - r key. (clumsy, i know, but it serves its purpose!)

then, to reset the game, mouseclick while pressing the a key. this simulates taking all the cubes off the tray and starting again.

to simulate changing one cube while other cubes are still on the tray (i.e. get rid of quote text, start projecting images onto cubes again) just mouse click.

major updates to our project:

it now has a working title (see above).

seanita joined us (hurrah!), bringing our group to three.

we got a quote from canal plastics for sixteen 10″x10″ cubes, and were told this would cost around $350. yikes! and that was just to cut the pieces alone - assembled cubes would be more than $400! we realised that we were unwilling and unable to spend that much on just the cubes, and made the decision to scale down our project. besides the expense, the footprint of our entire puzzle would be upwards of 40″x40″, and isn’t really practical for a p comp final.

our cubes will now be 4″x4″. we also already knew that we weren’t going to get to 11 million bits in time, so now we can stop counting and just punch enough bits to fill 16 cubes. judging from the first we filled, which took about 55,000 bits, we’ve still got a-ways to go.

we have yet to make a decision about what the tray we put the cubes into will look like - what material we will use and how it will be decorated, if at all. i have an idea to frame it with two halves of the brain, to give instant visual contextualisation, but i’m not sure if that will make it look too much like an exhibit from a science museum (or if it would be a problem, if this was the case), or whether it would look strange.

last weekend seanita and ej came round to mine and i made us all brunch. then we sat around my dining table for 4 hours punching bits. we set up a camera on a tripod and filmed ourselves. you can see our hands working around a big plastic container in which our bits are collected. when we checked the footage and fast-forwarded through it, we were pleased with the effect.

ej and i made a trip to canal plastics on friday to look for our cubes. they had a few ready-made ones, so we bought one that was 4×4, to see how many bits it would take to fill it. it was small but it didn’t come cheap - $15, and it hadn’t a lid.

when we got back to school we got hold of a hole punch and started making bits. using 4 pieces of paper at a time made the process a little bit quicker. it was an introduction to the experience of repetition and automation, but i shall leave my musings on that for a later stage, when we’ve done more bits. at this point i would like to make my apologies to trees everywhere for all the paper we’re using in this project. it has to be white paper too, to make a for a surface that can be projected upon. somewhere in the amazon, a rainforest is crying. oh dear.

ej took over from me when i had to go to class, punching bits while waiting for her comm lab video to render, and by the end of that day, we had a little over 10,000 bits. how about that? 11 million is still pretty impossible, but a number large enough to have an effect is definitely within our reach.

we met up again on sunday, and got up to 20,000 bits, which took the cube to just below half full. the bits were pretty packed in there, though, so we thought we might have enough of a surface to see what projecting on it might look like. we borrowed a little projector from the e.r, hooked it up to my laptop, and projected first an image, and then video. we were pretty pleased with how it looked - the bits certainly make for an interesting surface, with a nice dappled effect. [photos to come] packed densely enough (but not so dense that there isn’t room for the user to shake the cube about and rearrange the bits to an extent) and with a total surface area of 16 cubes, you should be able to see an image quite clearly. exciting!

we spent another few hours punching bits, and by the time we called it a day, we had 50,000 bits and a pretty much full cube. in the meantime we fielded many enquiries as to what on earth we were doing, whether we were insane, and if we planned to incorporate carpal tunnel syndrome as part of our finished project. lots of people gave us a very itp response: there must be a way to automate this. on one level, this annoyed me somewhat. for me, part of the project is precisely about process and the experience of making. in this day and age of automation, many would scoff at the idea that there is a meditativeness to repetition, to endurance. i rather suspect these same people will never understand the value of long distance and marathon running. because on the surface, yes, running 42km is a crazy thing to do. why make your body traverse that distance when a machine could do it for you? for me the answer is: because it is about your body, and an experience of your body.

to be frank, though, when i went home that night, my right hand was starting to feel sore from all the punching. swerdloff mentioned that in his office they have a hole punch operated by pedal, that they use to punch through hugely thick legal documents, that might serve to speed up our process a little. i think investigations into this, as well as electronic hole punches, are necessary, as to do ourselves any damage in the process of this project would be foolish and unnecessary. there’s a right way to running long distance, and a wrong way. besides, if we still have to feed the machine with the paper and keep track of all the bits, we’re not cheating - there’s still a process we have to undergo. if we were just to put a stack of paper into a slot and sit back and wait to collect a bunch of bits from a container though - that would be cheating.

next on the agenda: if a 4×4 cube holds only 60,000 bits, a 10×10 cube would hold 150,000 bits, giving a total (over 16 cubes) of 2.4 million bits. if we could achieve that, i think that would look pretty fantastic. now to find out how much 16 10×10 cubes would cost. back to canal plastics for a quote. and in the meantime, the punching of bits continues…

i’m realising now the importance of keeping track of a project as it goes along - far easier than to fish about in the recesses of one’s memory for details after it’s done! so here goes:

ej and i went to see tom about our final project last thursday. our idea comes from one of the readings - the bandwidth of consciousness, from the user illusion. i actually read that book a few years ago - i stumbled upon it (i don’t remember how) in the university library; and because it was written so accessibly and the ideas in it were so interesting, it captured my imagination and started me on a path of reading anything about neuroscience that i could get my hands on and understand.

anyhoo. the central aspect of the reading that we want to represent is the idea that we take in 11 million bits of information per second, but are only conscious of 16 (to a maximum of 40) per second. stop and think upon that for a minute - isn’t that quite astounding?? that we are capable of taking in so much - so much more than we can handle in terms of being aware of at any moment in time. the body in the world is an amazing thing.

so our idea is to bring this tidbit of information to the user, and represent it in a physical way.

we want to make 16 clear plastic cubes and fill them with 11 million bits of paper. yes, we’ve been told this is insane. by various people. (even multiple times by some people.) we understand that given the constraints of the final (i.e. only 4 weeks to do it!) we may not manage to get 11 million bits. but! we’ll see how we go.

we also want to make it a puzzle. originally we wanted to have part of an image on one surface of each cube, and when the user puts the cubes together in the right order, it closes the switch on the puzzle tray and it lights up from the bottom, illuminating the image on top of the cubes. an extension of that idea was also to then trigger a video to play - a sped-up video of ej and i cutting up bits and putting the project together - paralleling in a sense the way in which the brain works to process all the bits we take in, out of sight and behind the scenes of what we’re conscious of.

another version we thought of involved all the cubes being identical, with blank surfaces, but with either resistors or rfid tags on the base of each to give it a unique identity, and a “right” place in the puzzle tray. the user would then have to guess at the position of each cube in order to be rewarded with the image at the end, projected onto the cubes.

tom gave us some ideas on how we might do this, including projecting part of the image onto each cube as it’s placed in the right spot on the tray. we are also going to try using a camera positioned at the bottom of the tray to detect whether the cubes are in the right spot. more specifically, we could make it such that it doesn’t matter which cube is placed on the tray - the camera will detect that there is an object in position 1 (for example) and this will cause that part of the image to be projected onto that cube.

we are also toying with the idea of having 16 different images; where the image that the users receive depends on which position in the tray they place the first cube. if they put a cube in the bottom right corner first, they will get image no. 16. if they start at top right, image 4, and so on.

the best thing about the meeting was that tom gave us a couple of concrete things to attempt. the first was to make one cube, fill it with bits, and see how well an image or video projects onto it. (we had initially thought of making one of the surfaces opaque, to be projected upon, but tom suggested that using the bits as a screen might give us a more interesting effect.) the second was to start writing a processing program that mirrors how the images would be displayed, using mouse clicks on squares on a screen that would reveal parts of images, in lieu of being triggered by the presence of cubes in a tray.