Iceplate

Building the lamps, meeting with Smilen

Today we had a long meeting with Smilen about the project. We learned a lot from this and got some new ideas for Max/MSP. We hope to get this working as fast as possible and get it to work with the tracking patch so we can show exactly how it is suppose to work.

We also had a long discussion about the electronics we use, namely the infrared light. First of all Smilen wanted to make sure that we were not directing a lot of infrared light directly into the eye of the user. As the eye cannot see infrared light, the eyes will not react to it - even if it is strong enough to damage the eye. This should not be a problem however, for several reasons.
1. The Vision 2000 screen we are using is a diffusion screen. A picture from a projector will be very sharp but all other kinds of light will be scattered in a huge diffusion on the screen. Even though some infrared light may still come through, it will be very far from dangerous in intensity. After all, you can stare straight into a projector located less than a meter below the screen without getting blinded by the light and by testing with the webcam, we can see that infrared light becomes diffused too.
2. The infrared lamps are angled and put on the sides just below the screen so that they do not light up into the user. The user will most likely not be hit by any infrared light at all, except for on the hands.

This is all very important to mention in the report. We also had a discussions about the circuits we have made as they are not using resistors. This is mainly due to the lamps being prototypes to see if they can light up enough to work with the camera. A better construction would be to include a resistor, and maybe be able to plug the circuit into a wall outlet for continuous power, as the circiut would more than likely not be able to handle this at the moment. This, along with drawings of the circuit, is very important to mention in the report too.

posted by Alex Langberg @ 23:58