Fridays Meeting (Design and Technology)

We met with two professor's of Design and Technology (DT) and walked in on a demonstration. They have a program that is projected onto a floor pad about 12' x 12' ft2. The floor is equipped with infrared lighting and motion sensing cameras. The minicar senses darkness against the white pad and tracks it shape.

We would like to use a similar technology using Computer Vision/ Blob Detection to recognize shapes in the intersection to trigger the interactive crosswalk.

Hopefully we will be able to animate all this in After Effects...

The DT guys also said the fiber optics embedded with LEDs in asphalt is feasible so we will research how this would work.
Andreas, the only critique we had for the curb and arrows idea is that if a cars are parked next to the curb, it won't be seen. As usual, your presentation was very beautiful and you are very skilled with diagramming. We would like to further develop the idea of bathing the pedestrians aproaching the curb with light, perhaps tracking the pedestrians with a spot-light? or tracking them with intense light, like Jenny S's diagram?

Direction we are heading:

-Interactive crosswalks
-Lighting up the pedestrians
-LED's and fiber optics
-Computer Vision/Blob detection

For next week, lets refine these ideas. We have 4 weeks to go and we are surprisingly right on schedule.

Spreadable OLED's

www.engadget.com

1. This could either be spread or "painted" on virtually any surface, leaving an OLED screen that would be just 100nm thick.
2. At would also double as a solar panel that'd keep the OLEDs powered, something that's apparently possible due to the "similar, but opposite, principles" that OLEDs and solar cells work on.
3. Researchers from Sumitomo Chemical and Mitsubishi Chemical are aiming to have usable prototypes ready within the next two years.

Fiber Optic Sources

Bellow are company sites that Lyn sent us, they are dealing with fiber optics. Jenny and I will look at these sites on Friday in class, and try to purchase some materials to begin working with. We will also be meeting with Thai today.

the Fiber Optic Store
thefiberopticstore.com
Supplier of clear fiber optic filaments in spools.

Oakridge Hobbies
oakridgehobbies.com
Excellent resource for clear and fluorescent fiber optics, acrylic sheets
and rods.

Plastecs company
plastecs.com
Retailer of inexpensive fiber optics and fiber optic kits.

Curbstone Direction Lights

Hi,

the following picture shows a possible concept of curb embedded lights, which are telling the direction of pedestrians detected by our sensor-system. The light shape is like an arrow to describe the direction but it is also possible to indicate the direction by a sequence.

greetz

4-Way-Detection

Hi,

sorry again for the late input. Finally I tried to concentrate on the different directions from where pedetrians can approach an intersection. I developed an idea dealing with the problem relating to our tasks from last week.
I have to admid, that now after reviewing this solution, I found some problems with this idea: If only one light is on, you don´t have any relation to which direction this light belongs. For me, signaling the direction, was one major fact in anticipating what will happen at the intersetcion. Hopefully we get to discuss about this in out Skype-Meeting this evening!

cya