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Syllabus

The second year of Interaction Design course is aimed to provide students deeper knowledge, both practical and conceptual on few major elements in the world of interaction design. Interaction Design is indeed a very wide discipline, trying to provide students with a practical knowledge that may be used almost instantly after and during the course, this year will try and focus the attention on only few elements of this universe of possibilities. The main elements of this course are: Tangible Interfaces, Physical Computing, Materials and physical artifacts and Computer Vision.
As last year, the course structure will combine physical in-class work, utilizing “learning by doing” techniques. At the same time, students will be asked to research and explore many of the above aspects, providing didactic materials that will be published, and will form the bases of the department’s on-line knowledge base. Opposing to last year, students will be asked to work individually and at times in pairs. The result, in form of innovating products and interfaces made by the individual student, will be presented at the end of the course to the public.

Tangible Interfaces:

Tangible interfaces (Also known as TUI / Tangible User interface) are communication tools in which a person interacts with digital information through the physical environment. In our course we will first explore and learn ways to create such interfaces. Those magical interfaces that are physical on one side, mostly appearing as physical objects or artifacts made from different natural and synthetic materials. At the same time, they are “controllers” and “actuators” of functions dealing with digital data, the digital data is a wide set of elements, from pure text data, to music, videos, images, and at times, even “social particles”.
Later, Students will be asked to develop and design such system, developing the full interaction, both on the physical and virtual aspects.

Physical computing:

Deeper investigation in to the world of “Micro-Controllers”, Students will be introduced to the “Wiring Board” as well as advance electronic techniques.
Wiring is an open source programming environment and electronics board for exploring the electronic arts, tangible media, teaching and learning computer programming and prototyping with electronics. It illustrates the concept of programming with electronics and the physical realm of hardware control which are necessary to explore physical interaction design and tangible media aspects. Wiring is an open project initiated by Hernando Barragán (Universidad de Los Andes | Architecture and Design School). Wiring started at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy and it is currently developed at the Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia. Wiring builds on Processing, an open project initiated by Ben Fry (Broad Institute) and Casey Reas (UCLA Design | Media Arts). Processing evolved from ideas explored in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab.

Computer Vision

The science and technology of machines that can “see”. As a scientific discipline, computer vision is concerned with the theory for building artificial systems that obtain information from images. The image data can take many forms, such as a video sequence, views from multiple cameras, or multi-dimensional data. The camera in this case is used as the human eye; nevertheless the organ that actually “sees” is the brain, interoperating the images to what us humans call “Vision”.

While using “computer vision” and pattern-recognition software to control on-screen emulation of everyday devices, the students will be able to prototype a physical interface. The interface, realized as a controller for devices or services, will use pattern-recognition for implementations of physical knobs and buttons. Just like the musical tool Reactable, which incorporates pattern-recognition to control sounds and audio effects, this course will be directed to create substitute interfaces for devices such as: TV, Radio and Audio devices; or for services like browsing Flickr’s photos, YouTube’s videos and I-tunes on local machines. Based on “Reactivision”, students will make use of a platform created by Nastypixel as a rapid prototyping tool. This tool enables students to swiftly mold interfaces for a wide variety of purposes. As open-source methods of development become a new standard, students will literally open up the makings of interfaces to expose their mechanisms of operation. Combining both physical and conceptual interface ideas, students will learn ways to rapid prototype their ideas in the future.

Among many tools and computer languages such as C++ and Action Script, students will be introduced to the “reacTIVision” platform. reacTIVision is an open source, cross-platform computer vision framework for the fast and robust tracking of fiducial markers attached onto physical objects, as well as for multi-touch finger tracking. It was mainly designed as a toolkit for the rapid development of table-based tangible user interfaces (TUI) and multi-touch interactive surfaces. This framework has been developed by Martin Kaltenbrunner and Ross Bencina at the Music Technology Group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain as part of the the reacTable project, a novel electronic music instrument with a table-top multi-touch tangible user interface.

Yaniv Steiner with Giovanni Curreli - Facoltà di Architettura di Alghero - Università di Sassari