For this project we had to visually represent information inside a database. Just “googling” the words visual data on the web can get you tons of similar projects with nifty graphics and fancy designs. To me, all these data representations are trends. You get the circle-type designs, the bar graphs, the illustrations, and so on, but do these have any leverage anymore? I wanted to approach the project in a different manner, therefore I did a lot of research into physical computing.
My project is about communications. At first I wanted to integrate cellphone technology in the piece, but instead I took a simpler method to make my message come across. How Are You Feeling is a very simple piece, from a form on a webpage people select whether they are happy or sad. Depending on the global answers of people, cups with lights inside them turn red or blue. The purpose of the project was to make an interactive piece for the class. It is completely anonymous, and from the color represented in the cups, the class can physically see what is the general mood inside the class. What was surprising about the presentation was that the cups went from red to blue constantly, showing that a lot of people in class are sad. This doesn’t come as obvious since when you ask someone how they are feeling, the polite answer is always “good”. How Are You Feeling, to me, had a very strong impact on me, and I hope it had a similar impact on others in class.
Technically, the project was quite complicated to accomplish. The page where users input their mood is made with PHP and radio buttons. It connects to MySQL and adds +1, either to sad or happy, to an integer value in the database. I also created a PHP page that generates from the database an XML file, updated every 5 seconds, to speed up my Processing code. If I coded my Processing sketch to directly connect to MySQL instead of XML, it would have slowed down the process by a lot, because every 120 frames it would have to reconnect to make the program real-time. When it connects to the XML document it just parses a file, so it is much faster. Since Processing takes values in XML documents as strings, I had to transform those into variables. Afterward, I compare them to find which one is highest, and then I send to an Arduino code, through a serial port, the information. If the Arduino code gets that Happy is higher than Sad, it will send a command to it’s physical board to light the red L.E.D and turn the , if it get’s the information that Sad is higher than Happy, it will tell Arduino to do the opposite.
I feel like the project has a lot of potential as a communication device. On a small scale, two people can have similar cups and they can share how they feel together without using words. On a bigger scale, the project could remain the same but with the cups being replicated a hundred times to have a stronger visual impact. I would also like to make it, instead of turning from red to blue, be a nuance of the colors. If 50% of the participants are sad, then the cups would light purple, if 75% of the participants are happy, then it would be a red-ish purple.