Ermal Dreshaj, Xavier Benavides(Listener), Judith Amores(Listener), Sang Leigh, Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao

MIT Media Lab

Project Description:

clayodor (\klei-o-dor\) is a clay-like malleable material that changes smell based on user manipulation of its shape. This work explores the tangibility of shape changing materials to capture smell, an ephemeral and intangible sensory input. We present the design of a proof-of-concept prototype, and discussions on the challenges of navigating smell though form.

Final Report:

link to final writeup

Video: 

link to video

Special Thanks:

Hye Soo Yang

Jili Huang

Ricardo Alvarez

David Lobser

Isabelle Alles

Gal Sasson

Omer Shapira

Project Description:

A shared VR/AR platform where people can co-design their environment using superpowers, while having fun…!!!!

What we’re doing for the presentation:

We plan to show our ongoing work in the use of VR and parametric design as a tool for co-designing urban/architectural spaces.

1. We’re using VR to let people “feel” proposed urban designs, while allowing them to vote on what they like or don’t as feedback input;
2. Also, we allow people to interact and change the pre made  designs by using superpowers ;
3. Allow multiple users to have multiple asynchronous co-design sessions.
4. Finally we place the proposed designs in Google Street View as a proxy of how it would look in the real world.

All of this will be done within a VR environment.

Important: We’re not making a professional’s tool, but more of a interaction/design platform for everyone.

TEI’15: Eighth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and
Embodied Interaction, Jan 15-19, Stanford, USA
Submissions due: Aug 1,

HRI’15: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction,
March 1-4,Portland, USA
Submission due: Sep 26

DIS ’14: Designing Interactive Systems Conference, June 21-25, Vancouver, Canada

EICS’15: ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing
Systems, June 23-26, Duisburg, Germany

TVX ’14: ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for
TV and Online Video, June 25-27,Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom
Submission due: ended

CABS’14: Collaboration Across Boundaries: Culture, Distance &
Technology, August 21-22 Kyoto, Japan
Submission due: ended

Ubicomp ’14: The 2014 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Sept
13-17, Seattle, USA
Submission due: ended

MobileHCI ’14: 16th International Conference on Human-Computer
Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, September 17-21,Toronto,
Canada
Submission due: mid – end May

RecSys ’14: Eighth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, Sept 27 –
Oct. 1st, Silicon Valey (San Matteo), USA
Submission due: ended

SUI ’14: Symposium on Spatial User Interaction (co-located with UIST
2014), Oct 4-5, Honolulu, Hawai (USA)
Submission due: June 27

UIST ’15: The 28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and
Technology, Charlotte, USA
Submission due: April 2015

CHI PLAY’14: ACM SIGCHI Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction
in Play, Oct 19-22, Toronto, Canada
Submission due: May 18

VRST ’14: The 20th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and
Technology, Nov 11-13, University of Edinburgh, UK
Submission due: June 30

ITS ’14: Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces, Nov 16-19, Dresden, Germany
Submission due: Jue 30

ICMI ’14: International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, Nov
12-16, Istanbul, Turkey
Submssion due: ended

We will present a fountain (as in small houseplant-size decoration) which acts as a proxy to facilitate non-invasive communication about presence and level of activity.

However from today’s discussion, we start to explore the fictional situation where every senses can be captured and replayed, and eventually making those experience devalued as they can be easily duplicated and replayed with computers. People will less appreciate scent of a flower or a wine, which defeats the purpose of this project to enrich the experiences.

Therefore we are looking to find the exact form of this technology that have a balance between enriching the senses within digital communication and letting us still value the ephemeral experiences. In addition to this, we started exploring the idea of bridging the attributes (that changes over time) of physical objects and worlds into the digital – such as materials decaying over long period of time, materials changing properties over time, and so on.

References:

http://www.amazon.com/Remembrance-Things-Past-Volume-Budding/dp/1561633240

http://www.snapchat.com/

Jim Hollan’s work on digital paper

This is an experiment with simulated face-to-face communication using procedurally animated avatars. Our project will not only focus on the character overlay system, but also on translating physical attributes to character animations. We are hoping to derive these attributes from portable sensors like accelerometers, gyroscopes, heart rate monitors, etc…so that this experience can be taken anywhere, unlike cameras and depth sensors.

Here’s a link to our project video.

• E-Mail: ermal at media dot mit dot edu
• Website: www.ermaldreshaj.com
• Department: MIT Media Lab – Object-based Media Group

Experience:

I worked previously in the Perceptual Computing Group at Intel Corp, where I was involved in the research and development of HCI techniques, mobile gaming interaction and depth-sensing camera technologies.  I received my BS in Computer Engineering from Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio where I focused primarily on digital design and computer architecture.  My experience in computer technology spans from the low-level architecture and embedded programming to high-level programming, such as C++ and C#.

Why

I’ve always been critical of augmented reality as an interaction technology, so I want to learn more about it from experts in the field and see if I might change my mind and learn to appreciate it more.

Hye Soo Yang

Jili Huang

Ricardo Alvarez

David Lobser

Isabelle Alles

Gal Sasson

Omer Shapira

Comments Session 04/11/2014

We started reviewing our project by discussing the parts for which we feel strongly about, particularly about letting people participate on urban/architectural design as our core function. This has several facets:

1. Let people “feel” the proposed designs and observe their behavior in a non-intrusive manner;

2. Allow people to interact and propose changes to pre made  designs using superpowers (simple set of superpowers such as push and rotate for example, other powers such as fly we deemed too complex as an experience and we’ll decide later);

3. Allow multiple users have co-design sessions simultaneously.

Important: We’re not making a professional’s tool, but more of a interaction/design platform for everyone.

Our project should also allow for VR/AR switching in order to enable design sessions for different scenarios. We talked on how important is in some instances to actually go to a place and experience the design “on-site” because of the additional sensorial information and place anchoring effect this has.

We agreed that we we’re going to take it step by step because of the complexity of the project. For this we’re going to work on:

1. VR experience (solo);

2. VR design (solo);

3. AR experience (solo);

4. AR design (solo);

5. Simultaneous multi-users;

6. Expand superpower uses.

We’ll be exploring parametric design as a way for playing with design variations. We’ll be proposing a sample of a few design parameters with which we can start experimenting.

Some of the next steps are described below:

Description:

A shared VR/AR environment where people can co-design their environment with superpowers, while having fun…!!!!

Video Link:

https://vimeo.com/90864195

Additional support images:

Typical Static Urban Planning Design:

Some functionality/design principles:

Typical Static Urban Planning Design Board

Enjoy…!!!