Physical Computing Midterm Assignment

I met with Mike and Seanita to discuss ideas for this project. I threw out the idea of beginning with a blind person's cane and attaching sensors to ti so that when it came in contact with a wall or curb it would send vibrations or sounds to the person using the stick. I was even thinking it could record images and send those to the user as well, perhaps inside a headset giving the blind a picture of what they could not see. while this idea has possibilities we moved on to talking about Mike's ideas of recording body movements for example the involuntary motion of legs bouncing. if we attached sensors to socks and could capture that motion perhaps we could also turn that into a sound or visual collage. We tossed that idea around for awhile, then i saw the eraser sitting on the table...what if, i said we recorded the motion of a person using the eraser, as they wiped the text or images off a white board. Everyone got excited about that idea. It is simple but possible to execute. Mike knew what kind of sensors and tracking devices we could attach to the device to capture the motion. It would be easy to get numerous erasers to cut apart and attach wires to and there are plenty of volunteers we could solicit to help us track a motion. What interest me most is the motion is gestural, a drawing in essence, that is recorded as a series of numbers that we can then turn into visual and or aural data making a hopefully beautiful sound/image collage based on the movements of people interacting with the device. What I also like is while erasing we are also creating. We will see where this goes in the coming weeks. Documentation of our discussion was recorded by Seanita and Mike and can be seen here.