Presentation: Interactive Wall

1. Introduction/Short Review:

Thinking about you just purchased an apartment, you bother with what kind of decorated pictures you should pick for decorating your wall. You want to buy a wii sport, but you have a very tight budget. When you complain your life with your friend, he takes you to a technology product exhibition. You find something you might need in there. Now imagine you living in a house with an amazing wall which is combined with animation, and wii sport. When you walking around in your room, you feel like you are walking in a forest. You can play basketball with this wall in a rainy weather. You can show your music intelligence without a piano in front of your friends. Will you buy it? Now I will show you how a wall can be interactive with your body as a controller.



2.The Technology:

There is no enough information about how did they create this interactive wall. Therefore I googled “interactive wall” and found out some similar products. Hope these information can help us to understand the process.

Briefly, the wall is usually vertical screen where a user can approach and interact with her hand or body. it uses computer vision technology to make interaction between people and the wall. The picture moves with your every movement. The surface of the wall is kind of like a touch screen. Animation and sport games are already installed in it. You just need to choose which animation you want to display on the wall, which game you’d like to play. The designing system or principle of interactive wall is similar with wii sport system but a huge wall instead of TV.













3.Usefulness and Relevant:
A sustainable product is not only about save resources, reduce pollution, make sure product lasts longer, but also considers about people’s need, the daily life.
For example, parents sometimes find themselves worrying about their children's safety in playing sports outdoors, fearing that they may be injured. They also do not like children playing football or basketball in the home, because such activities tend to result in broken household items. But the interactive wall creates a decorative, safe, and imaginative playing environment for children.

4.Reflection:

I think the interactive wall is a creative product, even though it could not replace the normal wall now. During my research process, I found many amazing videos about sustainable products. Successful design makes people’s life more interesting and easier.
In the future, these kinds of energy-save products will become the mainstream, and now are only the beginning stage of such inventions, but also required a more in-depth research. Sustainable product will become universal, which plays a main role in people’s life.

5.Reference list

1.The video “Interactive Wall” is available at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e3dWa3tP1Q
Other useful links
2.http://www.gesturetek.com/gesturefx/productsolutions_wallfx.php
3.http://www.boldtoad.com/blog/?p=130
4.http://www.odcsss.ie/content/visualising-environmental-sensor-data-interactive-wall

WEEK 2

In week two, we were also focusing on Sustainability. In the contact class, we discussed three questions about sustainability.

1.Why is it important? Purposes of a product should be sustainable because of we need to reduce pollution, we need to save resources, we should care about our life and social environment.

2.Who does it affect? Sustainable products affect everyone’s life. We are using resource at a continually increasing rate, creating the need to react restore, preserve what little resources we have remaining. We are now reaching a peak of oil consumption and production. Human consume 80.5 million of barrels each day. Demand is increasing 2-3%. When will we reduce our oil dependency? Rain-forests once covered 14% of the planet; there are only 6% of the original forests remaining.


3. How can we design things to be more sustainable? Designer should keep “sustainable” in their mind when they make a new product. Such as they should consider about how to make product lasts longer? People/user should have a good behavior on their daily life. For example: Change all of the light bulbs in your home to compact fluorescent which use a fraction of the energy compared to typical light bulbs. If every household in US converted 5 light bulbs to CFs, the energy saved would almost equal the emissions from nearly 10 million cars.
Separate any recyclable materials out of your trash. Every American consumes nearly 136 pounds of resources each week with 2000 pounds used to support that consumption.
The average individual produces about 4 pounds of trash each day. Nearly 1600 pounds each year.
Replace your shower heads with low floe shower heads; doing so can reduce your water consumption by 50%.

During the workshop class, we had some short presentations about what could we design to improve sustainability. Every group gave a great examples, and Stephen drew a diagram on the whiteboard that is contained all of the good ideas about sustainable products.

Here is the diagram:

WEEK 1

(This journal should be posted on week one.)

Forgive my bad memory, I just remember couple of things we have done in week one.

1. We created our personal blog in week one.
2. We need to post a journal for each week.
3. Looking forward to what we going to create in this semester.

We had Will Odom as our guest lecturer; he talked about what is sustainability, and he showed us some good videos about sustainable products.

“Physical computing”, before I attended the first class, I thought is an abstract subject. But after the first lecture and contact, and I look through some examples and videos on web, I found most of them are very interesting.