Details

Hi everyone! Harder, faster, better... Recently nothing else matters and still...Time does no exceptions and that is why I would like you to inform that I closer every day to finish my Experimental Media project. And so, this time I can show you more detailed description of what I am building. 

The idea is to have four URM37 V3.2 Ultrasonic Sensors attached to fingers and a tiny camera attached to palm. All sewed in to a glove. The user is able to observe the world around him wearing this glove. Primarily, I wanted the user to see the world by wearing this glove and seeing things wearing a visor on his head. This idea came from Char Davies's projects where there is an image of a person wearing a visor connected to the rest of the equipment with cables. Obviously, this approach would be too expensive so in this case a screen will do. 

In my previous post I was explaining the ideological background of my project. Like I said, human hand is the medium of recognition in my project. World and materials within it are changing thanks to human touch sight. The user will be able to explore the matter thanks to its virtual representation. A person wearing this glove is seeing the world changing via touch.  

My plan is to use Max/MSP Jitter and Arduino. Two platforms speaking to each other by sending data. The URM37 is sending values of a distance between the hand and an object to Max/MSP Jitter. Jitter and its visual effects is there to manipulate the picture. At this stage I am working on special effects in Jitter. I want to have as many effects as I can get so that the user will be surprised by the vast diversity of virtual representations.

Now, a short description of how I am dealing with the project:

First of all, I have bought two URM37 V3.2 paying approx. 10 pounds for each. It was hard to find the 'Parallax' Ultrasonic Sensor on Ebay but I thought that buying URM37 is a better option because of its additional ability to recognize the temperature changes. That is the link to its preferences: www.yerobot.com/download/mannual/URM3.2%20Mannual.pdf

Everything looked good until I had to connect the URM to Arduino board. With the Parallax it is a piece of cake becuase its got three pins and one cannot be wrong with plugging this thing in. Here, I had to research on URM as its chip has got nine pins. The proper configuration found on: http://www.yerobot.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7&p=10&sid=72f4c2fbb84bf3

The next part is the Max/MSP Jitter patch that recognizes different values of distance. This patch has been downloaded from Lecture 6 of Experimental Media uploaded on TVU Blackboard thanks to Richard Colson: