Journal

A Few More Production Shots

6th May, 2009

Just a couple more photos I’ve taken along the path of producing my biofeedback interface handle.

Simple biofeedback measurement and amplification:

After I had started making finger grooves:

Turned Wood

4th May, 2009

I decided to take a quick shot as a preview of the turned banksia nut wood before further processing. The material of the first one (bottom) was too soft to produce my modified bullet shape design, so I reverted to the simpler shape for the second nut.

The two banksia nuts turned into the handle shape.

The next stage will be to hollow out the centre of the handle to allow light and wires through.

Diane Gromula Artworks

3rd May, 2009

Two pieces highly relevant to my own project’s field are Excretia and The Living Book of Senses.

Diane Gromula

The biomorphic font changes according to biofeedback input from the user.

Adding a Joystick to DirectX

29th April, 2009

Having acquired a joystick I was eager to try it out in my DirectX project. This is theoretically a very easy thing to do, but of course, it isn’t turning out that way. While the sample project and tutorial instructions are incredibly easy to follow, and the sample project compiles and runs perfectly well, starting to apply this code my own project is not straightforward.

Something which I am now starting to accept is pretty typical of Microsoft’s code is that they do something totally differently to the way that they themselves have said it should be done, and don’t bother explaining WHY.

Nevertheless I shall persevere with adding this to my project with the intention of linking camera control to the joystick, but the responsiveness of the motion will be dependant on the strength of biofeedback signal.

Update: I discovered I was trying to fix an issue that didn’t exist when all that was required was including the dinput8.lib file to the project…

Joystick

28th April, 2009

It was only bought for its components, but before doing anything with it I needed to test it was working correctly and what sort of functionality it has etc.

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Banksia Nuts

28th April, 2009

Before I actually do anything with them, I have taken a few shots of them ‘as is’ after receiving them from axminster. One thing to be noted is that they are actually quite large, so to avoid wasting this intriguing raw material I will probably rethink the size and shape of my joystick handle design.

The two together.

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Arrival of Packages

28th April, 2009

As I suspected, my two separate orders arrived at exactly the same time, so I’ve been unpacking my banksia nuts courtesy of axminster.co.uk and my cheap joystick from amazon.

They certainly looked better as mysterious parcels.

Banksia Nut Wood

25th April, 2009

So here is the wood I have nearly finally decided to make my actual physical interface from. Aside from the massively intriguing aesthetic nature of the wood, I feel that it draws attention to the physicality of the interface and fits in with a plan to emphasise the human-computer connection by allowing me to create a piece that emanates light from its core when interacted with. Essentially the holes could be illuminated from the inside and glow to indicate the level of connection between the user and the computer.

Image from axminster.co.uk