The exhibition

They day of the exhibition was here! We did some last minute fine-tuning and checked that it all worked and went to prepare our table at the exhibition. Aside from over-heating batteries everything went fine and people seemed to enjoy and find the prototype and concept as interesting! We were quite happy!

Upper left: The prototype. Upper middle: Shachi and Johanna wearing the bracelets. Upper right: Our table. Below: Trying the communication out with visitors!

//Love and Johanna

The video

In this video we introduce our main concept, which is that of promoting interaction in public spaces. We see a sad person with one of our beautiful bracelets equipped with stunning LED-technology (Neopixel Ring) that displays that he has not been hugged enough today. A person who is more happy, spots this person and moves in to hug. When the hug is complete both receive "Happy Points" from the action and they are now both happy!

Created by Johanna Andersson, Love Larsson, Shachi Bista and Bálint Zsiga.

The final solution

In our final solution we used one phone to communicate with the rFleas through ANT+ protocol, without using a server. That's maybe not the best solution if we want to develop the concept further and let more players participate in the game, but that was the easiest solution with the resources that were available for us.

While there is no interaction between two participants, happiness level is indicated on the Neopixel rings. In every minute (it was 1 minute for the demo, but can be different interval), the reFleas are getting notifications from the phone to decrease the happiness level. Heart beat like blinking of the last LED indicates that there is connection between the phone and the rFleas.

During interaction the touching participant's RFID reader reads the tags on the other's back. A rainbow cycle animation starts on it's Neopixel ring, indicating that something good is happening. The rFlea sends a notification to the phone about the interaction, which forwards it to the other participant's rFlea, which starts the rainbow cycle animation on the Neopixel ring as well.

During a hug, different amount of happy points are gained by both of the participants, according to the duration of the interaction. The giving participant always gets half of the amount of points as the receiving, since we thought these hugs are intended to make the receiving participant happy but making a people happier causes happiness for the giving participant as well.

After the interaction the Neopixel rings are showing the new level of happiness.

Help can be found for the ID-12 RFID readers here. 

Source code

Last minute challenges

After soldering all the equipments, it turned out that the delays in the operation of our device are caused by power consumption problems. Because of this reason we had to regulate the Neopixel ring's power consumption. As we recognised this problem quite late (little before the demo), the easiest solution was to set its brightness lower. A better solution could have been to supply energy for the Neopixel ring directly from the battery. In this way we could have kept its brightness, but it would have required more soldering which we didn't have time for.

Another fast change what we had to make was the relocation of the RFID reader from the finger to the inner side of the wrist, because of the reasons which were mentioned in a previous post. As a result of this the concept has also changed. From now on the interaction was only limited to hugs, rather than allowing every kind of touch.

The last challenge was to find out where to place the RFID tags to sense the different hugs. For this we conducted a fast 'research'. We asked around 15 people to give a hug to Shachi and we signed the wrist positions on his back. It was really interesting as we got really different result than what we expected. So we had to relocate the already placed RFID tags :)

Video about some of the participants of our hug 'research':

Last days until the exhibition: Putting the prototype together

During the last days we made the bracelet for the wrist and incorporated the rFlea and battery in the design by using handicraft and soldering. We sewed small pockets for both and fastened them with velcro on the back of the bracelet.

Left: rFlea that is connected to the battery and the NeoPixel ring. Middle: Gluing the velcro on the leather bracelet. Right: Bracelet and the two rings (in blue leather for bracelet A and B) with the leather bands for hiding the wires.

 
It is worthwhile to mention that we made two bracelets with corresponding tech (bracelet A and bracelet B) since we wanted to show the communication and interaction in the game to a full extent. Sadly, the RFID-reader on bracelet B stopped working before the exhibition, leaving us with only bracelet A that could read the RFID-tags placed on the other participant. The cellphone still worked though and could send the data a reading from the RFID-reader on bracelet A gave to both bracelets and displaying the corresponding Happy Points on each NeoPixel ring. 

As stated before we wanted to connect the rFlea on the bracelet with the RFID-reader on the ring to make it all work. We hid the wires with leather bands going from the bracelet up to the ring on the finger and the NeoPixel ring, that would show the amount of Happy Points gained, was placed on the bracelet instead of the ring. By placing the NeoPixel ring on the bracelet it was easier to carry for the user than if having it on the ring.

Left: The intented design of the bracelet and leather band hiding the wires connecting the rFlea and RFID-reader. Right: Incorporating the tech, rFlea and NeoPixel ring on bracelet and RFID-reader in red.  

During the last days before the exhibition when we tried everything together we found a problem, we had previously tested and noticed that the RFID-reader could read the tag even if we had our hand inbetween them but now it couldn't read through the leather in the ring. We revised the design and placed the RFID-reader on the back of the bracelet making our bracelet/ring-jewellery into a simple bracelet. It both looked better and worked fine now. The prototype was ready for the exhibition!

Getting closer

So after failing with quite some options how we could implement the communication between the two rfleas, we finally found a working one. We had a lot of ideas in mind, eg. doing it with spacebrew or just with a stand-alone server. But usually faced problems, what we could not work around. This last one which led us to the final solution was that we still didn't have 2 phones, but the deadline is getting closer and closer. So we went with a solution where we only use one phone which communicates with the 2 rfleas.

At the moment the communication works. We have even put together another RFID reader with the second rflea. Unfortunately we are still having some problems with delays in the communication. We think one reason could be the bad connections on the breadboard. To make it work we always has to squeeze the cables to the reflea with our hands. At this point we think we can't really work further without soldering the cables on the rflea, as the bad connection is causing so many errors that we don't really know anymore if the problem is in our code or it's just the bad connection.

Shachi & Balint

Thinking about the design

We were thinking about the design a little bit and felt that if we were going to put the NeoPixel ring and RFID reader on the finger, there would be a lot of wires protruding the wooden box which would look a bit strange (Also, there was a problem of how we were going to solder them altogether). So in order to solve it, we thought maybe we could create a ring-bracelet hybrid. For inspiration, we took "Greek-styled" slippers (I don't really know if that's what it is called).

Possibly made of leather as well, the wires can then be made with conductive threads, which themselves can be embroidered as a design and will be much more flexible than copper wires. 

They can also be inside the leather bracelet hidden from view.

We were thinking of placing the RFID reader on the finger and the rflea and battery on the wrist along with the NeoPixel ring (hidden under the wrist bracelet below).