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Class in the Spotlight
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Interfaces get ‘Physical’ in new course
 Photo by Wayne C. Moore In Physical Computing class March 14, student Chris Quinn moves a sailboat across a tub of water by blowing into a microphone that’s attached to a PC. By Monique Bos Published: Friday, April 6, 2007 During Winter 2006, a new course debuted in the interactive design and game development department at the Savannah College of Art and Design: Physical Computing, developed and taught by Carla Diana. According to the course description, the purpose is to encourage students to explore “nontraditional input devices to create interactive user experiences.” Or, as Diana said, “The … class involves ‘creative technology,’ or building art and design projects using any combination of electronics, mechanics and software.” The inaugural course consisted of six students, three undergraduate and three graduate, as well as graduate teaching assistant Shao Ying “Elisa” Lee. Assignments required students to “take real-world objects such as toys, motors and bookshelves, and [embed] them with electronics so that they respond to people in the real world, using inputs besides a mouse and keyboard,” said Diana. “The idea of the class was to stay away from the traditional ways we interact with computers — for example, a monitor, cable or mouse,” said Phong Nguyen, an undergraduate student. “It introduced new ways to interact with digital technology, such as touch-screen, body gestures and vision.” He said the objective of many of the students’ projects was to control the physical using physical gestures. “The computer takes the input from you, analyzes it and produces something physical,” he explained. “Usually the physical controls the virtual. The main thing in the course is that the physical controls the physical by using the computer.” The students presented their work at a public art event, “Glowies,” March 2. The class attached magnets to battery-powered lamps and placed them on metal surfaces around River Street. Other projects they created included, according to Diana, “an automatically tilting rearview mirror, a touch-sensitive drawer and a toy boat that moves along the water as you breathe into a microphone … [as well as] a ‘smart’ bookshelf that can keep track of where titles are located, a watering can that helps on-screen flowers to grow, and a gesture-responsive sound and light machine.” Some students — such as Lee, who developed three projects as part of her thesis — wrote their own software programs. However, the nuts and bolts of the course ranged even beyond that. “We actually dealt with electronic stuff — radios, wires, soldering — and learned about binary, circuit boards, all that,” Nguyen said. “It was something different to interact with.” He thinks the work the students did reflects emerging trends. “It’s really different, more into the future,” he explained. “Right now, the Internet is still a big component of interactivity. People are so accustomed to it that it takes time to actually get there.” He said it often takes a few years for products to catch up with technology and to catch on with consumers, so work in the Physical Computing class felt cutting-edge in many ways. “We tried to look for these different input and output devices,” he explained. “It’s more about theory, not things you can [necessarily] use now, but that’s why it’s fun.” Nguyen said he took the Information and Interfaces class taught by Diana during the fall quarter, and that was one reason he signed up for Physical Computing. “She’s really excited and passionate about interactive design,” he said. He thought the class brought attention to the interactive design element of the major — which is sometimes overlooked because people focus on the game development aspect, he said. “A lot of people [in the program] are just doing games,” he explained. “I think this class really helped get interactive design students out there, and it was a lot of fun.”  |
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