Conceptualization
When presented with the prompt of using ML5, I needed to think about this medium as a whole. This interaction between the physical and digital world, what is it lacking? The answer, thanks to my dad who brought up this conversation, was touch. This then led me to think about touch as a medium. Where do this innate desire to touch, to feel come from? I decided to thne focus on the idea of touch in the womb. Wouldn't it be special for us to be able to touch and interact with babies while they are still in the womb?
Testing
Testing out the transluscent paper from my ripple project and whether it would work with the projection behind. I wanted a projection so that the shadow wouldn't affect the image, which is a huge problem that I believe a lot of projection mapping installations have today. Luckily, the translucent paper did work perfectly for this.
Coding
Coding was hard, as always.
Step 1: Gt the ML5 to work. I used a circle class to create many many spheres that pops up at random places. Originally I thought about using actual images of baby's hands, but I thought that was too literal and didn't look good.
Step 2: After creating the circle class, I then found an image of a womb to import in. Then, I wanted to add some sound effects so that it would play when I touch the particle, almost as if forming a connection with the baby. Had to teach myself about how to manipulate sound in P5. Also scrolled through a lot of sound to find the right one.
Step 3: Add baby laughing sound. I used adobe audition to edit out different segments of a baby laughing. I wanted it so that every few times you press the particle it would trigger a laugh from the baby, almost as if you are playing with them. Also had to crash course teach myself adobe audition real quick.
Step 4: Adjust the different width and length to account for the actual projection. Going to make a square frame so had to account for that.
Building
For the building part, I bought wooden sticks and constructed a cube frame. I used nailing and wood glue in the process. Afterwards, I cut out a piece of translucent paper to cover one side of it so that the projection can shine through from the other side.
Big thanks to my boyfriend kevin for helping with the building part.
Arduino
The arduino side of things definitely was not pretty. I wanted to use a pulse oximeter so that when you put your finger on it, the image opacity would change, mimicking a heartbeat. This would reinforce the connection between the participant and the baby.
I started off with the templates given on the class webpage. The pulse oximeter somehow wasn't working at first. Big thanks to Professor O'sullivan for taking the time to meet with me outside of office hour.
After getting that to work, I plugged it into arduino, which wasn't working for a while. After fixing the arduino side, the p5 side stopped working too.
The worst part was that when combining my original p5 file with the arduino, everything just stopped working. There was a lot of things going wrong in the HTML index, and I had to get a lot of help from the coding lab in order to figure that out.
Setup
FINAL
*click on bottom right speaker to turn on sound