Mood Floor
DescriptionMood Floor is the Sons of Sensor entry for the second task of Scrapheap Challenge, Absent Presence. Mood Floor is an interactive floor which projects the users mood onto a Tron-style grid. Valence comes in 3 primary forms:
Secondary forms appear when primary moods cross-over e.g. purple indicates a person who selected red to carry their mood and someone who selected blue walked over the same area. Valence information decays over a period of several hours, thus giving an impression of who came before and how they felt. The longer the user stays on a grid coordinate the stronger the valence imprint i.e. takes longer to decay (max of 2 hrs 40 mins). Technical SpecsMood Floor was built using the following components:
Mood Floor Grid Controller (MFGC)
MFGC InterfaceThe MFGC is a Windows software application, it is responsible for driving Mood Floor. The MFGC receives location data i.e. (X,Y coordinate), from the floor which is translated into a grid coordinate. The respective grid coordinate is lit up indicating the presence of the user. The grid coordinate is initially assigned the neutral colour unless a selection has already been made via the weight table. When the user exits the floor via its upper segment (towards the kitchen), the current valence charactistic is reset back to neutral so a new value can be selected via the weight table (situated in the kitchen). Weight Table |
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Users register their mood by touching i.e. coffee cup, the side of the table that best reflects their mood. On receiving a signal from the user the affect information is passed onto the MFGC which when in receivership of new tracking information colours the grid using the designated valence. |
Weight Floor
Mood Floor in Action
The weight floor is a self-made wooden contstruction measuring 1.8m by 2.4m. Industrial load cells attached to each corner of the floor are used to track people walking over it.
Load Cell
The load cells are interfaced by a custom made board. The schematic is similar to the schematic of the load add-on board used by the table. (For more information see http://ubicomp.lancs.ac.uk/twiki)
Board Schematic
A small VB program constantly calculates the position of a person on the floor. It also detects when the person leaves the floor towards the kitchen. The position information along with the floor exit event (if any) are sent to the MFGC via UDP in order to update the grid.
Projector
The projector is used to cast the MFGC's interface over the floor.
Setup
Mood Floor is currently set for use in the Interactions lab. The interactive floor is placed on the route to the kitchen. The floor stores the most recently selected valence value.
Walk across the board and step off at the end nearest to the kitchen to reset the mood to neutral. The weight table is situated in the kitchen, choose the desired valence by pressing the respective colour.
After selection the board will light up with the choosen colour when walked upon.
Possible Improvements
Currently the system only captures physical presence. Awareness of past presences is provided locally. However, a web page could be easily linked to the physical space, e.g. a personal web page to a office space. Visitors of the web page could vote how for the web page. This information would be projected to a "web visitor chair" in the form of laughing or crying faces. Vice versa the web page would have a a picture of the projected image.
We also realised that awareness of absent presence may be raised by making the actual trails more explicit rather than highlighting only grid points.
Downloads
Offline Version of Mood Floor (requires
OpenGL)
MFGC Source Code (Visual C++)
Weight Floor Source Code
(Visual Basic)
Weight Table Source Code
(C, PIC Code)