Author: Michelle Annett

We need participants for our user study!! [Updated]

| Michelle Annett

Update: Due to the overwhelming number of responses we have received, we are no longer looking for participants! Thank you very much to all of those who volunteered for our study!Dr. Walter Bischof, Fraser Anderson, and I have just started running a user study and are looking for people in the Edmonton area to participate! In our study, you will get to wear a super nifty motion capture jacket, have your muscular activity recorded by EMG electrodes, and use one of the AIRTouch multi-touch tabletops that Fraser and I have built. We are using all of these technologies to compare different rehabilitation activities: those performed on a multi-touch tabletop and those performed on a traditional table. The information collected during our study will be used to evaluate the potential of multi-touch tabletops in rehabilitation programs.

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We are looking for people who are 18 years of age or older who weigh less than 220 lbs (due to the sizes of motion capture jackets that we have). The study will take place in the AMMI Lab (Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta) and will take approximately one hour. Participants will receive $15 CAD for participating in the study and an additional $5 CAD if all tasks in the study are completed. The study is running from July 18th, 2011 to August 5th, 2011.

For more information and/or to schedule a convenient time to participate, please contact our research assistant, Gauri Chaggar, at chaggar1@ualberta.ca.

Convert System.Windows.Media.Brush to System.Windows.Media.Color and vice versa

| Michelle Annett

I am working on a project that uses C# and WPF and I have been having one hella time on one small technical problem: converting between different classes of colors. All I needed to do was convert from a System.Windows.Media.Brush to System.Windows.Media.Color in one part of my code and then convert from my System.Windows.Media.Color back to a System.Windows.Media.Brush in another part of the code. Needless to say, it was easy to go from Color to Brush but not from Brush to Color (I searched high and low using Google but had zero luck – hence my post on the topic!).

For those out there who need it:
Color -> Brush
Color newColor = Colors.Blue;
Brush imageColor = new SolidColorBrush(newColor);

Brush -> Color
Brush newColor = Brushes.Blue;
SolidColorBrush newBrush = (SolidColorBrush)newColor;
Color imageColor = newBrush.Color;

Also, a ScatterView does not like to scale Canvas objects.

DIY-ing, Sparkfun, and Adafruit

| Michelle Annett

After meeting with a number of fellow grad students who are working on course projects for Walter’s CMPUT 607 – Introduction to Human Computer Interaction course, I realized that I have been recommending a number of textbooks and manuals to people starting in HCI/with DIY-projects, but I don’t have a central place where people can view them. As I order most of my books from Amazon or Chapters (whenever they have them!), I have added a ‘My Recommendations’ widget to my blog. Currently, the recommendations are all based around books that I use all the time (on Arduino’s (my new ‘it’ thing) and interaction), but I will switch out books whenever I discover new must-have’s!

If you are starting with the Arduino and electronics for the FIRST time, I highly recommend Banzi’s Getting Started with Arduino book. I also recommend Noble’s Programming Interactivity: A Designer’s Guide to Processing, Arduino, and Openframeworks for anyone new to human computer interaction, motion tracking, basic computer vision, Arduino, processing, etc. Both of these books provide many tutorials, code examples, and pictures. They also are written for beginners and people who aren’t technical, who maybe don’t know how to code, or who don’t know what a sensor is. I found the approaches taken in these books to be very helpful when you are first learning.

As I am giving a shout-out to the books that I love to use for my projects, I also think it’s important to share the links to the various sellers/websites that I order components, Lilypad parts, and Arduino boards from. All of the websites below ship to Canada!

  • Sparkfun: I can’t even tell you what I would do if Sparkfun didn’t exist. They sell everything Lilypad and Arduino that you could ever need, have a great list of user-submitted projects, code examples, and tutorials, and have reasonable shipping to Canada.
  • Adafruit Industries: I just found Adafruit two weeks ago and started following them on twitter, but they have a very unique set of products available and I already received my first shipment of a very exciting product I will post about later. Really great Twitter feed and jobs section that just started up.
  • Sparkle Labs: I found this place three weeks ago from a blog post on Gizmodo about Gizmodo University. Aside from their very good DIY Electronics Kit, they sell some cool parts such as pink LEDs, rainbow LEDs, and a solar cell. They also have very quick shipping to Canada.
  • RobotShop: A Canadian company that sells actual robots, as well as a number of sensors and actuators, including some really weird things such as a Flame Sensor! Lots of breakout boards for Arduino.
  • Phidgets Inc.: An Alberta-based company that sells Phidgets, which are like much more precise, high-tech Arduino’s. Phidget’s sample at a much faster rate than Arduino’s, making them perfect for research projects. They sell a number of I/O boards that you can use with virtually any sensor, as well as a number of sensors, motors, switches, LEDs, etc.
  • Coolight.com: My resource for all things Electro-luminescent wire. EL Wire is cheap and looks super awesome. My favorite example of EL wire are the Daft Punk EL Wire costumes. They have good customer service and reasonable shipping to Canada.
  • Maker SHED: Although I haven’t ordered from Maker SHED in a while (mostly because Sparkfun/Adafruit carry many of the same things), this website is a great resource for books, kits, Make Magazine, and those awesome little BristleBots!

Happy DIY-ing!

Tabletop Research in the News

| Michelle Annett

On October 20 and 22, the Glenrose held pseudo-press conferences to share the success of my multi-touch tabletop and it’s activities with the local Edmonton and St. Albert media. To date between 40 and 50 patients have used the tabletop, and many patients and therapists reported that it has produced many great results. I hope that these positive benefits will continue with new patients and that we will be able to make a few more tabletops for the Glenrose. I also hope that we can get many more tabletops into other hospitals and clinics around Alberta as well. If you would like more information on this project, please don’t hesitate to contact me!


Media links:

My lack of updates

| Michelle Annett

Over the last few months I have been very busy with supervising interns, getting my tabletop ready for the Glenrose, working on course assignments, etc. I regret that I have not been able to post more because the point of moving my website over to a blog format was so that I would be able to update it more frequently. Starting today, I hope to update it weekly because there are many many exciting things happening! For the next few posts, I am going to try and capture all of the projects and events that have been happening over the last few months.