WaterBox is a musical loop station where depending on the user’s physical interaction with water plays different loops either individually or simultaneously. And, the track type changes depending on the roughness of the waves and ripples of the water surface. The final prototype is created using Kinect v2 to capture the waves of the water surface by its depth, and Touche Advanced Touch Sensor with Arduino for the capacitative sensor and interaction with water. Through the WaterBox, I wanted to share the rich feeling of interacting with water and fun of creating different music with physical motion of your hands in the water.
The calibration for the depth and the pixel counts for activating the change of track types was the most difficult part due to different lightings and positions of user’s arms. The final version will be carefully calibrated in the space with the accurate placement of supplement lighting to minimize the error caused in some of the user-testing videos. Also, I had a difficult time with the Touche library for the capacitative sensor code for calibrating and separating the different user inputs.
The following videos are user testing of the prototype:
The main feedbacks/questions that I have received are the following:
- What happens if there is a user that has a long blue shirt?
For the above question, I have decided to edit a portion of the code (the minThresh) in order to ignore any pixels that are above the box height to disregard possible errors.
- It will be good if there are some signs of possible interactions
For this feedback, I thought of creating a page of possible interactions in a succinct way. For instance, a page with a diagram and a text: “one finger, two fingers, the whole hand, or make waves” can provide basic instructions while not giving the whole idea of what the project is about.
Update:
<Created Signifiers to aid the interaction>
