The Pixel Farm

Just a quick test of a light-sensitive Augmented Reality environment that will soon become inhabited by a colony of virtual snails!  Different colored lights will affect the environment in different ways, changing the system’s color balance and thus making certain snails easier to detect by predators.

In this demo you can see a blue light making small forests grow up out of the ground.  Eventually this behavior will be triggered by a green light [I accidentally left all of my LEDs in NYC this weekend! ]

Visual neglect is a neurological condition that causes an individual to lose awareness of one side of space, causing one to behave as though half of the world simply does not exist.  The condition commonly affects individuals who have suffered a stroke in the right cerebral hemisphere.

The following project is a prototype of a therapeutic tool that could be used in a clinical setting to assist an occupational therapist when working with a patient who has visual neglect.  A common technique used by clinicians in working with patients with this condition includes finding ways to bring attention to the side of the body that is not being perceived.  The goal of this technique is to help train the individual to compensate for their loss of perception by using the unaffected side of their body.  This tool is designed to help support this activity by doing the following:

• Provide a digital “mirror” for the patient, allowing them to see themselves within their current environment.
• Once oriented, a clinician can begin a flow of multicolored objects along the top of the screen.  The flow of the objects can be adjusted to correspond to a specific client (i.e. a patient with “right-neglect” can have their objects flow from the right, whereas a patient with left-neglect can have their objects flow in from the right).  This re-orientation is designed to coax the patient into compensating by turning their stronger side towards the stimulus.
• The patient can reach up and “catch” the objects, causing them to pop and increase their score.  In the future this system could be expanded to include a series of rewards, such as videos, animations, or even new games or challenges.

Here’s a quick video that demonstrates the basic features of the system:

You can try out version 0.1 by doing the following:

• Navigate down and click the “Start!!!” button to begin.  Note that this demonstration requires that you have a webcam running on your computer.
• Position yourself so that the top of your head is between 1/2 to 1/4 of the way from the top of the screen.
• Ensure that the video is more or less still and not shaking around.  Once this happens click the “Calibrate Video” button.
• Reach up and try and catch as many balloons as you can!
• If you accidentally move your webcam you can click the “Calibrate Video” button again to reset the display.

Well I’m finally getting around to using this blog space!  It’s been (sadly) sitting here lying dormant for the last few months, but this morning’s “Communications Lab” class inspired me to revive it and begin adding relevant content.  I routinely tell my students at TCNJ about the wonders of blogging, so it’s high time begin practicing what I’ve been preaching!

The #1 piece of advice I hear from former ITPers is to “document, document, document!”  I’m hoping that this blog will serve as a way for me to not only document my time at ITP, but will also grow into a larger vehicle with which I can keep tabs on the crazy experience that is living in New York City!