Interaction Techniques Using the Wii Remote (and Other HCI Projects)

The Wii remote is a sophisticated controller containing a variety of sensing capabilities.

Johnny Lee covers several interaction techniques enabled by the Wii remote and explains how you can develop your own applications.

You can watch it here.

Excellent presentation!

JC

Football game using Processing and OpenCV

This is a small game made by my team (Team 4).
You are the goalkeeper trying to defend the penalties.
You can move the goalkeeper position by moving your face.



It requires:
- Processing
- OpenCV library for Processing
- webcam

You can download the code from here.

The code related to OpenCV is taken from Ian's facetracking code.
All other code was based on a tutorial we found on the web, but made from sratch.

Enjoy and leave a comment.

JC

- if you are having trouble installing OpenCV on Windows Vista, see previous post (Face Detection working on Windows XP).
- you can detect your body movement (instead of only the face) by replacing the haarcascade XML file.

Face Detection working on Windows XP

Hi all.
After EI class I spend some time trying to figure out how to make Face Detection work on Windows Vista.
I manage to get things to work, but the face recognition doesn't start. The pictures are shown on the screen, but there is no scroll.

So I tried on Windows XP, and it worked.

I followed these steps:
- Download and install Open CV 1.0 (not 2.0) from here.
- On install make sure you tick «add path...».
- Although the system now has the PATH var defined for current user, you should define for all users (as a system variable).
- Copy libraries for processing to the library dir (unzip opencv_01.zip).
- Copy the xml file «haarcascade_frontalface_alt.xml» from «haarcascades» dir (found it in the Open CV install dir\data) to «data» dir that contains the png images for FaceTracking tutorial.
- Reboot

That's it.

Ian just posted a message on EI forum, and it seems Pedro Camacho found a solution for Vista/7 (I supose). You can find it here.

JC

Bike control system

For assignment 3 our final prototype is a «bike control system».
We didn't implemented it on a real bicycle, but you can get an idea of how it works from the following 2 videos.

Video 1:



Video 2:



Feel free to comment our work.

JC

Wii Party

The newest game for Nintendo Wii:



It's called 'Wii Party' and probably is going to be my christmas gift!!

What is Wii Party?
Wii Party is a brand new social gaming experience on the Wii™ console to enjoy with your family and friends, featuring 13 unique ways to play over 80 hilarious minigames.

There are Party Games, Pair Games and Minigames.



More info here.

How can this be related to EI?
I've just finished reading an academic paper (Embodied interaction in authoring environments, http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/juanr/papers/physicality.pdf) that talks about the use of Wii remote control to create a dance using Dance Along game authoring environment. It's interesting and worth reading.

JC

Breeching video for assignment 2

Here is our video for assignment 2.



The scenario was a shopping mall (Madeira Shopping @ Funchal, Madeira Island) at lunch time.

The goal was to create a plan where we could break a social rule.
The social rule was related to «eating behaviors» and we had to violate that rule by eating a meal NOT using the cutlery that would normally be used.

We made 5 experiences, and observed different reactions:
- Admiration
- Surprise
- Astonishment
- Staring eyes
- Laughing
- Some indifference

Final conclusion: people reacted more when we were sitting at their table than when we were eating in a different way (people considered it as a space violation).

Enjoy the video, any comments are welcomed.

JC

Term paper topic

Assigment 1 topic is due 13-10-2010.

I've read some papers related to context-aware computing in Education (thanks Ian for sending them), and this is an extensive investigation area.

Cisco is working in this area and have interesting solutions for schools.
They developed CAS (Context-Aware Services) that makes use of wireless devices, RFID tags and sensors to, among other features, indicate whether an asset is in or out of a permissible zone.
More info here.

I've also found a video about this solution.

JC