Hey guys, how’s things? I’m just gonna start this post saying thanks to everyone who has liked any of my posts and also followed my blog, I appreciate it! I’ll try and maintain this steady flow of articles that I’ve been managing for you all, although obviously posts will slow down once I’ve got past the “explanation” stage and moved into the actual “development” stage.
This post will be outlining the process I plan to follow in the development of the device, describing the general idea of the device, the user interface and the senses that it will be stimulating and how. I’ll start off with a recap with what the device will be and how I’m planning for it to work. The idea is to make a sensory device that uses colours, sounds and touch to attempt to invoke happiness in the user. The plan is to have each “sense” toggle-able, so that there is no potential sensory overload from all three combined. The device I will be making will be tailored to one specific person, who for the sake of confidentiality will be referred to as ‘Mary’, but the general concept would be that the device would be modular and easy to modify depending on the needs of the individual i.e. different sound files, textures and colours.
The user interface will be as simple as possible, for reasons described in the previous post. If possible, the raspberry pi would boot directly into the program, otherwise it could be started using an input device such as a mouse or a touch-screen. The senses could be mixed and matched through button selections, and depending on the combinations different inputs would be required. If the “touch” sense is to be used then this would automatically activate any other senses selected, otherwise they would have to be manually activated. If the computer boots directly into the program then the desktop could be accessed through a keyboard command or key combination so that files for the software can be modified or the computer can be used for other purposes (battleships anyone?).
The sight sense would be stimulated using a small screen that would display a predetermined selection of colours at different brightnesses, shades and intensities. This could either be in reaction to the touch sense or it could be set to activate alone or with sounds.
With sound, the software will hopefully access a folder that contains pleasant pre-recorded sound clips and would play through them randomly, again either in response to the touch sense or on it’s own/with colour. The sound clips would be played through headphones so as not to disturb others.
Touch would be achieved through sensor’s attached to objects that the user finds pleasant to touch. The actual sensation of touch would be satisfied through actually touching the object (obviously) but the plan is for the touch to be an input device to activate the other senses. I’ll give an explanation of how this will work in a later post during the development process.
Hopefully now you all have a more in-depth idea of what it is I’m trying to produce. An important thing to keep in mind is that this is all speculative planning – I don’t know how much of this is actually possible and how much of it I will be capable of creating, but hopefully none of these ideas are too far-fetched. We’ll see in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future.
The Thoughts of a Computer Scientist 