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Spicy Peanut Chicken

This colorful stir-fry gets its kick from a dash of red pepper.

Ingredients

1. 1/4 cup chicken broth
2. 1 tablespoon cornstarch
3. 1 tablespoon sugar
4. 2 tablespoons soy sauce
5. 1 tablespoon white vinegar
6. 1/4 teaspoon ground red pepper (cayenne)
7. 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
8. 1 pound boneless skinless chicken thighs or breast halves, cut into 3/4-inch pieces
9. 1 garlic clove, finely chopped
10. 1 teaspoon grated gingerroot
11. 1 medium red bell pepper, cut into 3/4-inch pieces
12. 1/3 cup dry-roasted peanuts
13. 2 medium green onions, sliced (2 tablespoons)

Directions

1. Mix broth, cornstarch, sugar, soy sauce, vinegar and red pepper; set aside.
2. Heat wok or 12-inch skillet over high heat. Add oil; rotate wok to coat side. Add chicken, garlic and gingerroot; stir-fry about 3 minutes or until chicken is no longer pink in center. Add bell pepper; stir-fry 1 minute.
3. Add broth mixture to wok. Cook and stir about 1 minute or until sauce is thickened. Stir in peanuts. Sprinkle with onions.

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Possible Technologies to use with the Interactive Surface

Technologies that I am currently looking at for this project are RFID tags and 3D barcodes to tag food product packaging. When you place the objects on the interactive surface, the 3D tags in conjunction with a a web cam, should be able to identify what food is on the surface. 

When you unpack your shopping, if you placed it first on your surface, it could log what food you have. This could help with suggesting recipes to cook. It could also help with making shopping lists.

Recipe Surface& Interactive Aid

... following along this theme of the counter recognising your ingredients, instead of twittering for recipes, it could search the net for them. Then take you to the site for them and find out how to make them. 

...Or there could be a library of recipes that gives you suggestions from the ingredients you.ve placed on the surface. Depending on the amount of people you want to cook for, the recipe quantities could change to suit you. Also in order to help you cook, there could be more than one sense used ie instead of having to read off a screen, it could be more visual with a video or  audio included.

Using gesture recognition, it could be really fancy, it could even be a weighing scales for you when you place an object on it, you could draw a circle around the object with you finger and it singles it out so you can get the info you want from it, ie the weight of it.

The Magical Island - RFID Tags / Video Tracking & Social Interaction

Another idea is to use RFID tags or Video Tracking on kitchen objects such as mugs which can be used to interact with the surface of the countertop and there is a few ideas where this comes into play.

Twitter

One of the ideas was to have the objects able to interact with each other and twitter about what is going on. For instance, Through movement of tagged objects on the surface this creates the table to twitter about what is going on. Each item is tagged either to an individual or a name or purpose ie a mug that is used by housemate x who particularly likes coffee is placed on the surface which then twitters "Shane in enjoying a nice cup of hot coffee". Another housemate comes along who hates coffee and is more of a tea man with lots of milk, it twitters "Carl has just joined Shane for breakfast but isnt a fan of the coffee, he's more of a milky tea man"

Each object could be given a list of tag words which it uses to create dialogue. When another person or another object is brought in, it starts a dialogue between them, ie a packet of biscuits (ie in the future, everything would be tagged) is put on the table and twitters "someone brought out the chocolate hobnobs, they mean business!" or "someone is hungry" or "yum, yum I love chocolate hobnobs!" etc

Each object could even have a profile attached that could be updated to keep the tweets fresh and more unique.

Another way to use twitter for this interactive surface would be that you could put the ingredients you want to make your meal out of. The counter would recognise these ingredients and use them to twitter for recipe suggestions. When you find one you want, you could get the step by step instructions for it.

The Magical Island - Augmented Reality

Another idea is to use Augmented Reality tags on kitchen objects such as mugs which can be used to interact with the surface of the countertop

The Magical Island - Visual Map

So now that I've moved towards the idea of designing an Interactive Magical Island (just to clarify, not one in the sea, a kitchen one). What shall it do and why...

Scenario One

A group of housemates are sitting around the island having a cup of coffee and a snack. The table detects where each person is through sound waves and creates an abstract visual map on the surface. As people are talking, ripples start to appear on the surface coming from the direction of where people are talking. If people are closer, louder etc, the ripples will be stronger and more distinct. 

By placing objects on the surface, this causes the ripples to bounce off it. If it is a heavy object, it causes a faster, stronger deflection than a smaller or lighter object,

I'd see something like this being made using sensors which communicate through arduinos to processing to create the graphical content - possible something like the video Flight 404 did for Goldfrapp.

Redesign / Banal Design

I've been looking at the idea of Banal design which highlighted the intellectual and cultural void which was perceived to exist in the furnishings of industrial society... (more to come on that one!)

Table as a teasmaid

Another idea would be to use the table as a teasmaid and visual display. Something like, if you're sitting around the kitchen table and you ask someone if they would like a cup of tea or use trigger words, it would transmit to the kettle and turn it on. The table could then respond by displaying something visual and artistic that says the kettle is on.

 

The idea would be that it would be a social and humorous addition to the home. A pattern could also be created that would display the consumption of tea that day. Depending on how big the picture was, it could give an abstract visual description. 

Concepts - Table as a Mood Reflector

One of the ideas was to use the table to show the moods of the inhabitants. Using voice sensors to detect the pitch etc the table could reflect the mood, ie if people are angry - its red, if people are happy, it's yellow.  If someone is shouting the table could start to build an abstract art pattern in dark, red tones but as they change their tone, the continuous pattern starts to evolve into a different colour. A paint my moods sort of thing!

The table could detect each individual voice and it is assigned a random colour and the voice range could produce a different continuous shape.

There is also the idea that it detects the mood and if people are angry the table could display, emit sound or light patterns to calm people down and restore the equilibrium.

Some of the ideas for shape have come about by looking at:

Paolo Ruffi - La Cova (1973)

Donato D'Urbino & Paola Lomazzi - Grionalan De Pas  (1970)

Gaetano Pesce - Donna Model No. Up 5 & Up  6 (1969)

Masanori Umeda - Gestsuen  & Rose (1990) 

Rocky Semprini & Mario Cananzi - Tatlin (1989)

Dissertation Panic

So here I am on June 18th in a wee bit of a panic over the dissertation project! It's been a while since I've blogged so I'm just going to throw some of the ideas out there to see if my trying to formulate them into some kind of discernible form, it will help to clarify them in my head!

Firstly, I'm going to do a little regroup with what I am doing - Interactive Living for the Domestic Market. Within this, I was looking at both appliances and furniture and through research was led towards designing an interactive table. The key words were ludic engagement, experience, communication and social interaction, home and ambiguity.

With further research, I decided that I wanted to focus on the kitchen. It has long been an important part of the Irish home, not just for cooking and eating but for socialising. How many times have you gone into a house, been offered a cuppa and sat in the kitchen, having a good auld chat!

From this again, I moved towards the idea of using a kitchen island instead of an actual table. I felt it was more inline with 21st century living.

This moved onto the idea of an interactive countertop area, a place where people could interact with both co-located people and distant located people. 

I wanted to use the area of social networking to aid people's lives in the home.

Sound Sensors

I've been looking at using microphones to detect sound and measure the intensity of the pitch of speech in a room which would then be converted to abstract graphics on a surface. Another idea would be to pinpoint where people are in the room by the noise they make which would be captured in the graphics created. Therefore the graphics would be constantly evolving in relation to what is happening in the room. All I need to do is find out how to do this!! I think I need to convert the air pressure signals to electrical signals to do this?!?

Polygon Playground

The Polygon Playground is a large scale interactive lounge object made by WhiteVoid which reacts and changes continuously to the presence, movement and touch of the people interacting with it. The installation features a software aided 3D surface projection system to cover the object with a seamless 360 degree projection mapping. An additional sensory system detects peoples positions and proximity. I really like it's not a flat object and people can interactive with it by being physical and climbing, jumping, running etc on it . To see it in action, click here

Electric moOns

Electric moOns by WhiteVoid is an interactive balloon ballet is made up of lighting and synchronised movement which allows the balloons to dance in sync with a chosen piece of music making them appear to float. I like this as it is really relaxing to look at due to its slow controlled pace. The use of music to control the movement really appeals to me as I would like to incorporate some of these elements into my project.  Originally one of the ideas I had thought of using music / noise / chatter to trigger lighting in a room of the home,. For instance, if there was a lot of people in the room, talking and laughing loudly then the lights would represent that or if just one person was sitting quietly, reading a book then then lights would be relaxing. Another idea was that, the lights would be hooked up to an old style record player and would react in accordance with the tempo of the music. 

Jam-O-Drum Pong

The Jam-O-Drum was first conceived in 1998 at Interval Research to support audiovisual collaboration by playing on drum pads embedded in a shared tabletop surface.  This device allows people to come together and play with interactive musical elements whether they have prior knowledge or not. 

It was made using MIDI with realtime video and computer graphic projections.

The Jam-O-Drum Pong is an extension of this research which, using the same elements created different versions of it. It kind of reminds me of air hockey too which I love! Players spin their disk to control paddle movement and block other players from scoring. To see a clip of it in action click here. 

Sketching Possible Designs

Yesterday I spent the day researching furniture and appliances and sketching shapes and ideas for what my interactive furniture look like. It was great to get back in the hands-on side of the project and now I can't wait to start playing around with the technology and actually making the furniture! As much as I do actually enjoy the academic side of the work, its great to get the balance of both research and prototyping. 

Developing Interactive Art - Stephen Howell

Another speaker at 3d Camp whose talk I really enjoyed was Stephen Howell's talk on Processing as I think I will be using it in my dissertation. Stephen's manner made for a very fun and interesting talk and broke down Processing as to why and why not you might use it for a project. He also gave me some good advice and things that I might want to look at such as a GoldFrapp Flight 404 music video which was made with Processing. As I discussed with him my ideas for interactive furniture, he suggested looking at a Frank Herbert book Dune that was made into a film as they have something called chair dogs! Im intrigued to check this out so I've bought it on Amazon to satisfy my curiosity!

3d Camp

3d Camp was on yesterday in UL but having gone up to Dublin for a less than 24 hour visit to see the NCAD grad show (and enjoy the after party too!) I didn't enjoy getting up so early and driving back to Limerick (thank god for coffee!). 3d Camp was well worth it though and I was really glad I had dragged myself out of my lovely cosy bed! There were some really interesting talks as well as informal chats in between, over tea and biscuits! My original intent for attending 3d Camp was that I thought it might benefit my dissertation, not only did it do that, but it gave me inspiration for other career avenues that may be possible using my skills. The first talk I went to was from Gary McGinty of Ion on Visual Thinking and I found it really interesting not just because it was a good presentation but Visual Thinking is definitely something I would consider pursuing as a career. It was all about helping companies to tell their stories through facilitation, consultation and design. With the final outputs being 3D images and animations created by Gary's company. 

David Higgins talk on using lego robotics as a teaching aid for engineering and programming concepts was also very interesting and we even got to see 'hig' the robot in action. David talked about Lego NXT (which I really want to play with now!) and Scratch - a programming language for everybody created by MIT which made computer programming seem ridiculously simple! Why didn't I know about this when trying to learn Java ?!?

I was particulary interested in Brett Lawless' talk on DIY Multitouch Haptic Interfaces. Brett talked about how he made a multitouch screen at minimal cost and covered the construction including why he did / didn't use certain techniques such as the Wiimote. The Wiimote seems to be a very popular tool for iMedia folks to take apart and make cool stuff with, including Johnny Lee from MIT.  The reason I found this so interesting was that a lot of his aims were in line with my own for this project. Brett talked about to make a webcam into a infrared camera with particular reference to the Microsoft VX6000. 

When I talked to him after about my idea to capture sound and use it to create art he said that the microphones that come with guitar hero for the PS2 are very good quality for the price so I may in taking apart some of those! Brett broke down different software libraries and gave the pros and cons which I found very useful. He talked about Wiimote lib - good for simple Bespoke - good for games, TUIO, TBeta (his favourite!) - simple and easy to program, can get clear images and TouchLib.

To finish up the day, Shane McAlister showed some really interesting examples of Mobile Augemented Reality including living sasquatch, toyota iq, bmw, US mail, world builder and tonchidot, maybe hovercrafts from Back to the Future aren't so far away after all...

NCAD Graduate Show

I had planned to go up to Dublin on Friday to see the NCAD and Dun Laoghaire graduate shows but I only made to NCAD due to time constraints. What did I think when I got there? Wow! First of all the college renovations have been completed since I was there the last time with the Harry Clarke House now open and it's lookin' pretty fancy! Due to all the catching up that has to be done at these openings I only got to see the Industrial Design and Visual Communications exhibitions. I have to say that I was very impressed with them. Having done the ID course in NCAD myself, I would always be very interested in what the course produces. The ideas were very interesting and their presentation of them was very impressive. I found their boards in particular to be of a very high standard. The layout, graphics and rendering and even how the shapes of the boards tied into their projects made for a very cohesive looking show. I plan to take another trip up as I didn't get to see the rest of the show or get to head out to the Dun Laoghaire show as I had to be back early the next day for 3dCamp!

HELP!! Shop Wanted

Another thing that I was doing this week was trying to find a cool, contemporary furniture store or interesting shop that would allow me to place my prototype in their shop so that their customers could test it for me. So far I haven't got anywhere so if anyone knows a place that might help me out or has any suggestions, I'd be very grateful!!

Homes and their Interiors

For the past few days I've been looking at different furniture brands, artwork for inspiration for my design and a bit of psychology thrown in for good measure!

The first furniture brand I was looking at was Domus.

Gestalt Psychology

I also started to look at Gestalt psychology where he talks about the principles of visual perception and how human organise information in order to understand it efficiently.  Gestalt says that this group of perceptual information and being able to link this to previous knowledge of a situation can help one to understand a seemingly new situation. Gestalts' principles have been applied frequently to User Interface Design and software. I may look into his work further to help build a strong foundation for my design. The reason I was pointed towards this theory was from looking at a previous students thesis - Celeste Bergin.

Thesis

I started to look at Celeste Bergin thesis on Ornamental Pattern:An Interactive Design Process as although it was not a similar topic, it did have interesting points on shapes and patterns.

 Surrealism & Dali

The reason I started looking at Dali was that a lot of his inspiration for his work came from Sigmund Freud's writings on the significance of  subconscious imagery. As I am trying to provoke exploration and for users to derive their own personal meaning, this held quite a significance. 

I have given a very brief overview of what I have been looking at this week but I plan on expanding these points in more detail above after 3dCamp!

Exhibitions

I had decided that trying to squeeze in as many exhibitions as possible whether they were iMedia or other types of design would be beneficial to my dissertation. Seeing various shows can inspire or trigger ideas or way of doing things that you may not have come up with from simply reading books. 

The other day I went to the Product Design exhibition in UL. What impressed me about the students work was the high quality of their models and their graphic work.

Tomorrow I'm off to the big smoke to check out the NCAD graduate show and the Dun Laoghaire graduate show and then it's back to Limerick for 3dCamp. Busy Busy Day!!

Lucky Cat - Droog

In Japanese culture when the lucky cat waves at you, you are showered with good fortune. As the balls interact with the cats, each one having its own chime means you become the conductor of the lucky cat orchestra. With this pinball machine you can win nothing but good luck. This is a really fun piece of Interaction by

Droog also.

Drogg Radiator

This interesting take on the conventional radiator is by Joris Laarman for Drogg. The design has a larger surface area which provides greater radiation of heat so not only is it providing an interesting piece of art work but it is also improving on its functionality.