I've finished my 7th semester of teaching at the Faculty of Computer Science, this time for the Human Computer Interaction Course held by dr. Buraga. With this opportunity I got to evaluate some witty ideas and concepts using technologies such as Leap Motion or MaKey MaKey. Here are the projects that caught the most attention:
Best in Class: Game Ressurection - Space Invaders
Let's start with the best team. They managed to take the classic Space Invaders game, rebuild it using Unity3D and add support for wireless controllers and MaKey MaKey custom gamepads. Even the main menu was a mini game (within a game) and they added extra features such as power-ups. You can watch the video demo bellow:
Being Global Design Ambassador for the Interaction Design Foundation has its advantages. Why you ask? Well we (me and dr. Buraga) collaborated with the IDF team and rewarded the two students behind this project with two free 1-year memberships. For all their progress you can visit the project homepage.
SeeSound
The team behind this project recorded sounds using the microphone (or uploaded files) and translated them into pixel art. This way people with hearing disabilities can experience the audio in a new and creative form. The process can also be done backwards - upload a picture and translate it into sound, therefore even blind people can feel the music.
Moreover they made their own format in order to be easy to distribute: they printed the recorded paintings and on the back they added a NFC tag. This way you just simply scan your phone and get the recording on the device.
You can check a quick video demo bellow. Also you can discover more about the design process and implementation phase. Or even better, you can interact with it for yourselves.
Beethovinci
The Beethovinci team made a custom educational tool where students can draw geometrical shapes using voice commands. The commands were based on the coordinates and properties for each shape. Besides this, you could also control the interface saying words like "clear" or "undo". A Dropbox upload feature was also demoed and what I appreciated the most was their clean interface and their commitment/responsiveness during the whole process.
You can check the video demo bellow or visit their Github page.
LIP (Learn Interactive Programming)
The final team I'm going to present didn't excel in visual design, but they managed to demo some pretty nifty prototypes using Leap Motion. Their project consisted in building a platform for learning programming (think of a very basic Codacademy).
The demos were based on gestures using the device: from shaking a stick figure to determine its descendants to highlighting the nodes from a Breadth-First-Search.
I especially liked the demo where you had a bowl filled with HTML plain text. Then, using gestures, you threw CSS properties into the bowl to customize the text.
You can check the video bellow or visit the project page.
PS: the project links are temporary; some students are in their final year and the links might become unavailable after their graduation.
Subscribe to stay updated
I added a subscribe feature for you to get the latest news from the blog right on your inbox. It's based on Mailchimp's RSS campaigns, so on each Wednesday you'll receive an email with what's new on the blog (if new posts exist).
If you are interested, head over at pxdotpt.com/subscribe/ and register now.