IoT and Wireless Sensor Network for Interactive Waka Structure

Partnership between technologists, engineers and artists often produces new forms of interactive and complex artworks. This paper discusses the role of a smart interactive art structure and reviews the novel ways in which it can serve the intended purpose. The interactive waka project is a multi-disciplinary project which involves in the production of an interactive six-meter-tall COR-TEN plate steel waka (traditional canoe) sculpture informed by Mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) about the Matariki star cluster. (Pleiades). This smart interactive structure will be will be located besides the Waikato river in Hamilton, New Zealand. The waka sculpture as a smart structure serves several main interrelating purposes that are centred on its symbolic, architectonic, and interactive functions. The use of human and environmental monitoring will enable co-constitutive real-time interactions, which will themselves be performatively incorporated into the field of relations. All the information gathered from the wireless sensors will be sent to the cloud, where it will be processed to determine how the waka structure's light and sound patterns should behave. The waka structure will be self-contained in terms of power, using sustainable energy sources such as solar, and will not be active unless humans are present. Data collected through the environmental wireless sensors network will be publically available through a website, using an open-source platform and the smart interactive structure will be gifted to the City of Hamilton in New Zealand

BioSync: An Informed Participatory Interface for Audience Dynamics and Audiovisual Content Co-creation using Mobile PPG and EEG

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Micropower sensate tags for supply-chain management and security

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 109-113).This thesis describes the development of a system of sensate active RFID tags for supply-chain management and security applications, necessitated by the current lack of commercial platforms capable of monitoring the state of shipments at the crate and case level. To make a practical prototype, off-the-shelf components and custom-designed circuits that minimize power consumption and cost were assembled and integrated into an interrupt-driven, quasi-passive system that can monitor, log, and report environmental conditions inside a shipping crate while consuming only 23.7 microwatts of average power. To prove the feasibility of the system, the tags were tested in the laboratory and aboard transport conveyances.by Mateusz Ksawery Malinowski.M.Eng

Interactive Tango Milonga: An Interactive Dance System for Argentine Tango Social Dance

abstract: When dancers are granted agency over music, as in interactive dance systems, the actors are most often concerned with the problem of creating a staged performance for an audience. However, as is reflected by the above quote, the practice of Argentine tango social dance is most concerned with participants internal experience and their relationship to the broader tango community. In this dissertation I explore creative approaches to enrich the sense of connection, that is, the experience of oneness with a partner and complete immersion in music and dance for Argentine tango dancers by providing agency over musical activities through the use of interactive technology. Specifically, I create an interactive dance system that allows tango dancers to affect and create music via their movements in the context of social dance. The motivations for this work are multifold: 1) to intensify embodied experience of the interplay between dance and music, individual and partner, couple and community, 2) to create shared experience of the conventions of tango dance, and 3) to innovate Argentine tango social dance practice for the purposes of education and increasing musicality in dancers.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Music 201

Moving sounds and sonic moves : exploring interaction quality of embodied music mediation technologies through a user-centered perspective

This research project deals with the user-experience related to embodied music mediation technologies. More specifically, adoption and policy problems surrounding new media (art) are considered, which arise from the usability issues that to date pervade new interfaces for musical expression. Since the emergence of new wireless mediators and control devices for musical expression, there is an explicit aspiration of the creative industries and various research centers to embed such technologies into different areas of the cultural industries. The number of applications and their uses have exponentially increased over the last decade. Conversely, many of the applications to date still suffer from severe usability problems, which not only hinder the adoption by the cultural sector, but also make culture participants take a rather cautious, hesitant, or even downright negative stance towards these technologies. Therefore, this thesis takes a vantage point that is in part sociological in nature, yet has a link to cultural studies as well. It combines this with a musicological frame of reference to which it introduces empirical user-oriented approaches, predominantly taken from the field of human-computer-interaction studies. This interdisciplinary strategy is adopted to cope with the complex nature of digital embodied music controlling technologies. Within the Flanders cultural (and creative) industries, opportunities of systems affiliated with embodied interaction are created and examined. This constitutes an epistemological jigsaw that looks into 1) “which stakeholders require what various levels of involvement, what interactive means and what artistic possibilities?”, 2) “the way in which artistic aspirations, cultural prerequisites and operational necessities of (prospective) users can be defined?”, 3) “how functional, artistic and aesthetic requirements can be accommodated?”, and 4) “how quality of use and quality of experience can be achieved, quantified, evaluated and, eventually, improved?”. Within this multi-facetted problem, the eventual aim is to assess the applicability of the foresaid technology, both from a theoretically and empirically sound basis, and to facilitate widening and enhancing the adoption of said technologies. Methodologically, this is achieved by 1) applied experimentation, 2) interview techniques, 3) self-reporting and survey research, 4) usability evaluation of existing devices, and 5) human-computer interaction methods applied – and attuned – to the specific case of embodied music mediation technologies. Within that scope, concepts related to usability, flow, presence, goal assessment and game enjoyment are scrutinized and applied, and both task- and experience-oriented heuristics and metrics are developed and tested. In the first part, covering three chapters, the general context of the thesis is given. In the first chapter, an introduction to the topic is offered and the current problems are enumerated. In the second chapter, a broader theoretical background is presented of the concepts that underpin the project, namely 1) the paradigm of embodiment and its connection to musicology, 2) a state of the arts concerning new interfaces for musical expression, 3) an introduction into HCI-usability and its application domain in systematic musicology, 4) an insight into user-centered digital design procedures, and 5) the challenges brought about by e-culture and digitization for the cultural-creative industries. In the third chapter, the state of the arts concerning the available methodologies related to the thesis’ endeavor is discussed, a set of literature-based design guidelines are enumerated and from this a conceptual model is deduced which is gradually presented throughout the thesis, and fully deployed in the “SoundField”-project (as described in Chapter 9). The following chapters, contained in the second part of the thesis, give a quasi-chronological overview of how methodological concepts have been applied throughout the empirical case studies, aimed specifically at the exploration of the various aspects of the complex status quaestionis. In the fourth chapter, a series of application-based tests, predominantly revolving around interface evaluation, illustrate the complex relation between gestural interfaces and meaningful musical expression, advocating a more user-centered development approach to be adopted. In the fifth chapter, a multi-purpose questionnaire dubbed “What Moves You” is discussed, which aimed at creating a survey of the (prospective) end-users of embodied music mediation technologies. Therefore, it primarily focused on cultural background, musical profile and preferences, views on embodied interaction, literacy of and attitudes towards new technology and participation in digital culture. In the sixth chapter, the ethnographical studies that accompanied the exhibition of two interactive art pieces, entitled "Heart as an Ocean" & "Lament", are discussed. In these studies, the use of interview and questionnaire methodologies together with the presentation and reception of interactive art pieces, are probed. In the seventh chapter, the development of the collaboratively controlled music-game “Sync-In-Team” is presented, in which interface evaluation, presence, game enjoyment and goal assessment are the pivotal topics. In the eighth chapter, two usability studies are considered, that were conducted on prototype systems/interfaces, namely a heuristic evaluation of the “Virtual String” and a usability metrics evaluation on the “Multi-Level Sonification Tool”. The findings of these two studies in conjunction with the exploratory studies performed in association with the interactive art pieces, finally gave rise to the “SoundField”-project, which is recounted in full throughout the ninth chapter. The integrated participatory design and evaluation method, presented in the conceptual model is fully applied over the course of the “SoundField”-project, in which technological opportunities and ecological validity and applicability are investigated through user-informed development of numerous use cases. The third and last part of the thesis renders the final conclusions of this research project. The tenth chapter sets out with an epilogue in which a brief overview is given on how the state of the arts has evolved since the end of the project (as the research ended in 2012, but the research field has obviously moved on), and attempts to consolidate the implications of the research studies with some of the realities of the Flemish cultural-creative industries. Chapter eleven continues by discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the conceptual model throughout the various stages of the project. Also, it comprises the evaluation of the hypotheses, how the assumptions that were made held up, and how the research questions eventually could be assessed. Finally, the twelfth and last chapter concludes with the most important findings of the project. Also, it discusses some of the implications on cultural production, artistic research policy and offers an outlook on future research beyond the scope of the “SoundField” project

An automated framework for power-efficient detection in embedded sensor systems

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2007.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (p. 191-200).The availability of miniature low-cost sensors has allowed for the capture of rich, multimodal data streams in compact embedded sensor nodes. These devices have the capacity to radically improve the quality and amount of data available in such diverse applications as detecting degenerative diseases, monitoring remote regions, and tracking the state of smart assets as they traverse the supply chain. However, current implementations of these applications suffer from short lifespans due to high sensor energy use and limited battery size. By concentrating our design efforts on the sensors themselves, it is possible to construct embedded systems that achieve their goal(s) while drawing significantly less power. This will increase their lifespan, allowing many more applications to make the transition from laboratory to marketplace and thereby benefit a much wider population. This dissertation presents an automated framework for power-efficient detection in embedded sensor systems. The core of this framework is a decision tree classifier that dynamically orders the activation and adjusts the sampling rate of the sensors, such that only the data necessary to determine the system state is collected at any given time.(cont.) This classifier can be tuned to trade-off accuracy and power in a structured fashion. Use of a sensor set which measures the phenomena of interest in multiple modalities and at various rates further improves the power savings by increasing the information available to the classification process. An application based on a wearable gait monitor provides quantitative support for this framework. It is shown that the decision tree classifiers designed achieve roughly identical detection accuracies to those obtained using support vector machines while drawing three to nine times less power. A simulation of the real-time operation of the classifiers demonstrates that our multi-tiered classifier determines states as accurately as a single-trigger (binary) wakeup system while drawing half as much power, with only a negligible increase in latency.by Ari Yosef Benbasat.Ph.D

Wireless inertial sensor system for the interactive dance and collective motion analysis

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 251-256).The motivation for this project is the recent opportunity to leverage low-power, high-bandwidth RF devices and compact inertial sensors to create a wearable, wireless, motion analysis system meeting the demands of many points of measurement and high data rates. This thesis outlines the implementation of such a system intended for interactive dance, in which sensor nodes are worn on the wrists and ankles of dancers in an ensemble. Interactive dance is in some ways an ideal situation for pushing high performance requirements. Collecting data in a highly active environment of human motion demands a comfortable yet sturdy wearable design. Obtaining detailed information about the movement of the human body and the interaction of multiple human bodies demands many points of measurement and high resolution. Most importantly, using this information as a vehicle for interactive performance demands the real-time translation of data into an efficient feature set that a composer, designer, or choreographer can interpret. Now that it is possible to extend expressive motion sensing to multiple points on multiple dancers, an interactive system is capable of responding not only to individual motions, but also to how an ensemble is working together.(cont.) The primary goal in this work is to demonstrate that simple features describing this type of collective activity can be extracted from the system and interpreted real-time, in order to generate responsive music or other immediate feedback. To this end, relevant strategies for feature extraction and music generation were implemented and tested, using data from a small dance ensemble. The results presented in this thesis show promising opportunities for future development in the areas of dance and interactive performance. In the broader scope, the hope is to expand this system to other applications, such as analyzing the dynamics of team sports, physical therapy, biomotion measurement and analysis, or personal physical training. Preliminary testing in these areas is also discussed.by Ryan P. Aylward.S.M