Indecision Space - Ask Oracle to help you choose

Introduction

For the first meditation assignment, with Dan Oved as my collaborator,  we created the Indecision Space, a mobile-friendly ritual accessed at  http://indecision.space. This is an “electronic” ritual that visualizes the conflicting thoughts we usually have when making a decision and explores how human's minds are influenced by unrelated implication when making decisions. In the system to perform this ritual, the participant:

1. Thinks of something he/she feels undecided or worries about
2. Holds his/her phone and waits patiently for 5 seconds for the results to come out
3. Gets a sentence of "oracle" that suggests about decision making

Documentation of ITP students performing Indecider

Inspiration

The idea of Indecider came from our discussion about what part of our daily routine is worth transforming into an electronic ritual. We went from ideas that celebrates our "graduation" from a day of ITP, as many of us stay in ITP until pretty late, to posting on Facebook every single time someone solves a bug, then finally to Indecider. We want to write a small program that performs the role of the Oracle of Delphi, who is the High Priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi that served as the oracle, that could let us know the "oracle" from program about our common life struggles.

How it works:

The oracle is actually nothing but a sentence "the answer has to do with something ..." plus an adjective word picked from a database with about 300 common english adjective words.  And to avoid stereotypes about "fortune telling" or "goddess", I sketched two cats, one for the "indecision" and the "undecided" pages  with a question mark and one for the "oracle"page with an exclamation mark.

We add a three-second waiting time before you can hit the button "Oracle, please help me choose" and  a five-second pseudo-loading time for the oracle to show. Based on our own experience and our observation of others performing the ritual, proper amount of waiting time in a ritual raises people's interest in and attention on the results that's about to come out, and it helps to enhance the sense of the ritual.

Thoughts:

As we experienced as well as observed, most people who performed the indecider ritual consciously try to build a loose connection between the oracle and a choice they have in mind, or try to interpret the oracle and associate it with some practical suggestions. And the interpretation actually to some extend is a process to convince the person who practice the ritual something he/she prefers or has decided.

The Hand

Featured in:

• Huffington Post - "Fingers, Water, Tails - Tactile Tech at ITP"
• New York University PR Team -"ITP Winter Show 2016 Highlight"

Final Presentation

As the continuation of the midterm project , Tong and Nick decide to develop their ideas and design a RPS game robotic hand (and arm) that are more interactive and with more personalities. The final presentation for this project is an installation in which users could simply come and play with the RPS game robotic hand without wearing any extra devices.

 

Process Explanation

Documentations

(1) 3D printed Robotic Hand & Forearm

To build the hand and the forearm of the robotic hand, we used the models from InMoov, an open source model library for 3D printed life-size robot. We used superglue and 3mm filaments to connect finger joints, 3d printed bolts to connect between the forearm and the hand, and used fishing lines and servos to control finger movements.

(2) Robotic Hand & Forearm Assembly

The Orignial Version (Nov.2017):

(3) RPS Robotic Hand w/ Flex Sensitive Glove

               We designed a flex sensitive glove for this installation. There are two flex sensors, a "start the game" button, and a “throw” button, all sewed to a right-hand glove and connected to a Arduino Nano board, which has a nRF24L01 wireless transceiver that talks to the other same-kind transceiver from the robotic hand part.

               To play the game, player would put on the glove, press the "start the game" button, then press the "throw" button twice, and make a hand gesture indicating his/her choice of rock, paper or scissors.

Final Version (December, 2017):

(4) Leap Motion

For better user experience, we use leap motion to replace the glove with flex sensors, which was in the previous version of the RPS game robotic hand. By doing so, users could simply activate the robotic hand by doing certain gestures such as waving.

（5）Re-design the forearm

We also redesign the cover for the wrist part and rearrange the motors, so a steel tube could run through the arm part, which allows the hand to be mounted inside an acrylic enclosure and move up and down freely.

Two other elements are added to the design: a gesture display board, and a set of LED lights. The gesture display board would light up the corresponding icon as what the user does during the game, which helps users to understand whether or not their gestures are detected correctly. And the set of LED lights would light up in turn when an user throws twice before doing a RPS gesture.

Flappy Shadow

"Flappy shadow" is a project by Kai Hung and Tong Wu that allows users to create and fly a virtual bird from their own shadow puppets.

Source Code at GitHub Page