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.

DT Contact - Thai Le

I met with Thai Le this week, he is a student in the design technology (DT) department. He seemed very willing to help us out and help answer our questions throughout the project. One of the projects he is working on now is very similar to our project.

Next week Jenny and I will meet with him, he has agreed to show us the DT department and introduce us to a teacher that could also help us. We will also look at the lab they have upstairs.

Image on Another Group's Blog

Fiday's Conclusions

Lauren and I went to the materials library and discussed with Heather some really interesting light embedding ideas. She suggested using fiber optics, because it is really efficient in channeling light sources and together with LEDS, they would be even more so efficient.

Fiber optic bundles can be threaded into asphault emitting light from an LED source, emitting minimal heat and lasts for a really long time.

It is possible to come up with an interactive computer interface that responds to external stimulation that translates to lighting. I took a digital architecture course last semester that dealt with this kind of relationship so I know it can be done... although I don't know if I could come up with the code that would drive such a device.

Some questions we haven't answered are how are the lights sensored? It should be solar powered? How do we configure the graphics? What colors do we use?