Project EMAR

October 28, 2016

Designing Eyes and Duplicating EMAR

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Designing Eyes and Duplicating EMAR

This week we are focusing on designing EMARs eyes, making some technical improvements, and building a duplicate EMAR so we have two versions to test in the field.

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Designing EMAR’s Eyes

The Feeling Heard student team is working hard to figure how what EMAR’s eyes should be doing to feel natural and expressive while interacting with teens. The team sketched a number of options to design the eye movements that the PC Team will program.

EMAR’s script is made to be as interactive as possible and speech will be programmed to respond differently based on input.  Currently the team is testing the difference between the original blinking eye movements compared to more expressive eye movements based upon the teen’s response.

Currently the plan is for blinking to occur after every user response. EMAR’s eyes will likely start out with “happy eyes” (arc shaped eyes) during the intro script, then the eyes are small and circular while EMAR asks the first question. They will then they get larger and more engaged looking after the user has responded with his/her mood.

Debugging and replicating EMAR

The Physical Computing team is debugging and replicating EMAR V2. When trying to determine what parts we need, we had some challenges to address.

Lights are currently too bright-

The current EMAR prototype has an unshielded LED display. As a result, the lights are extremely bright. Given that EMAR’s eyes are an extremely important component of its interaction with users, we decided to order an opaque diffuser to make the brightness less extreme.

No video recording, yet!

We want to be able to record video from EMAR, so we need to find suitable video recording devices.

Moving from external to internal audio

Currently, EMAR is wired to two external speakers. Though this works to project the robots “speech”, it is clunky and takes away from the human aspect that we want EMAR to portray. Internal speakers will make this aspect more fluid and consistent with the robots other properties.

 

Thanks for reading and come back next week to see our progress!