So I've had my first week off from my course, it stared with Easter, but when everyone else went back to work I remained off. Wow, being a student rocks! Well, it wasn't a complete break, we have a project and lots of study to do. This particular break is very difficult for me personally as I don't have my usual space or my desk, my desktop computer (with a mouse...) and half of my stuff is in a garage 50km away. Fortunately I have a place lined up, unfortunately it's not ready to move into for another 2 weeks. Do you know how hard it is to do a project when your not really living somewhere surrounded by all your belongings? Very very hard.

So my first week off consisted of studying. I've been reading tutorials on Jitter, pdfs on wearable technology (some of it a bit laughable tbh), and various links included in the original brief and slowly formulating ideas for this project.

I've had a few different ideas, but one challenge for me was to create something with an actual purpose, as well as demonstrating my understanding of the subject. It's all very well creating a garment that changes hues of a video when you move your arm, but why on earth would you want to do that? I had one idea of creating a jacket that sensed various gestures, perhaps you could make a squeeze motion and the video would compress, rotate motion and it rotate on a z axis. Okay not entirely useful either at first glance but it has practical applications, but more importantly it would be cool and impressive. But this demonstrates the second challenge. How on earth does one turn a keyboard hack into gestures? A keyboard is on/off, a gesture is variable. I had two possible ideas, one was to have multiple switches for one gesture to indicate the degree of movement. So it wouldn't be smooth, but there would a couple of degrees at least. Another was to create sensors that could detect variable movement fed into some sort of circuit that would then output steps depending on the amount of resistance the sensors were outputting. I'm not sure if either idea is very good or not but I can see potential headaches in the execution, particularly if one lacks a workspace. Oh btw, I'm also currently living 50km away from AUT... Joy.

Another idea was given to me by a good friend of mine with a sense of humour.  Zaphod Beeblebrox sunglasses. Zaphod Beeblebrox was a character in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and his sunglasses could would go black if confronted with anything scary so that he would maintain his cool composure that was so important. This was kind of a neat idea mainly for it's humour and it could possibly have been built upon but there were a few obstacles, one being I didn't come up with the idea which always disturbs me. The other is the need to make electro-chromatic sunglasses. Electro-chromatic glass (which took me a while to find out what it's name was) might in the future be available at every corner drugstore, but in 2010, it's a little hard to come by (spot the reference). But I did learn a bit out the glass, there are a few different technologies available and you can by the stuff for your home (although I imagine it's expensive). I only knew it existed because I remember watching Beyond 2000 as a kid and some story featured glass that had a layer of liquid crystal in the middle, passing current through it made it opaque.

Musical Pants

So on Sunday after skimming through the last of the Jitter tutorials, I had a look at a website called Instructibles and browsed the various tutorials in the tech section. Instructibles by the way is a website dedicated to showing you how to build or do certain things. Users make something cool document it and put up their own how-to. After looking a various fabric switches and sensors I saw a picture to the side of the page of someone tapping on his legs. Something I've been prone to do when listening to music. It suddenly occurred to me that I could add sensors to jeans and shoes and have them make actual drum kit sounds. Clicking on the picture took me to a tutorial when someone had done something similar which was a bit annoying, but fortunately his design wasn't as complex as the idea I have, I want to incorporate 6 - 8 different drums, his has 2. Also mine incorporates an optional shoe attachment. What would be pretty good here is Microsoft's experimental pressure-sensitive keyboard to alter the volume of the drum pieces, although I have no idea how it works and how easy it would be to hack. Then there is the getting working drivers for a mac. Yeah...

I could create sensors that have a dual response, doubling the number of keys used in the keyboard hack part, but my aim is to keep this thing fairly simple due to having limited time and limited workspace (AAARGH!!).