Physical computing,
From Institute of Intermedia
Physical computing means to extend human computer interaction beyond the mouse and keyboard. Most artists initially find that drawing with a mouse on a pad while looking at a screen is an unnatural process. Eventually, they get used to it but this is the wrong approach. Instead of making the artist get used to the machine the machine should adapt to the needs of the artist. One of the primary goals of this research proposal is to begin to make the machine adapt to the human instead of forcing the human to adapt to the machine. This will be accomplished in stages. The first stage is begin to make the computer aware of the user. This stage will be accomplished utilizing existing sensors, transducers and detectors. There are already many commercially available sensors that have the ability to detect real world input. One example of such commercially available technology is the sonar on a polaroid camera that measures the distance from the camera to the subject. With slight modifications, this sonar could be used to detect whether or not a user is in proximity to the computer or art piece. The second stage is to begin to utilize this awareness of the machine in useful and productive ways. There are a variety of visually oriented multimedia applications available on the market that can interpret a mouse click and trigger an event such as a projector. Perhaps the best known authoring packages are Macromedias Director and mFactorys mTropolis. Utilizing these existing authoring packages, it is possible to have them interpret the input from sensors to produce real world actions. The goal of the project is to use existing hardware and software to create truly interactive art works that are aware of the user and the audience.
