X Sense
By Andreas Nertlinge, Tamara Klein, Melvin Ochsmann, Koen Van Mol, Adam Danielsson and Per Nilsson
Description
X Sense
Sensory inventory
Close your eyes for a moment and listen. The steps of people, their voices around you. You see this in your mind’s eye. Without vision, your other senses fill in. Your vision tells you who just walked by and what’s in front of you. Cross-wire your senses What would happen if your ears were your eyes? What would it be like if your eyes worked like a sonar. The X Sense helmet is a sensory experiment by a group of Interaction Design students at Malmö Högskola’s K3 faculty. It takes input from microphones and uses this to create a visualization for the user and input from ping-sensors to guide the user through her surroundings by sound.
Specifics
The helmet is built with MDF and houses two Arduino boards, four custom circuit-boards for the LED display, two custom circuits for sound input, two covered headphone speakers, a battery-pack and a sanded glass screen. The exterior has holes for four microphones and three ultrasonic range-finder.
Visual
The helmet takes auditory input from the microphones and uses it to create visual patterns through a matrix of 64 (4 by 16) dual-color LED’s spread across four circuit-boards. The LED’s two colors (red and green) can be mixed into orange. 5V coming from either the red or green output (or both) gives each LED tension. Two 4794 control-chips (one per eight LEDs) on each circuit control which LEDs get lit by grounding them. Because of this, all LEDs share the same color when lit. To achieve the effect of different colors being lit at the same time,the refresh-rate is set very high. The LEDs pulsate in expanding groups, and in differing colors, determined by which mic is receiving input and by volume. The louder a sound is to your left, the more LEDs will light up on the left side of the screen. Low sounds generate small groups of one to three green lights, medium sounds generate four-five orange lights with loud sounds generating large groups of red lights.
Sound
The helmet has three ultrasonic range-finders distributed across the front of the helmet (center, left and right). They can sense objects up to 3m away. The feedback from each ultrasonic range-finder is translated to a specific sound. The rhythm of the sound is increased depending on how close an object is to the sensor in question. This is then mixed into stereo and fed to the headphones inside the helmet by letting the Arduino generate a square wave from the input. The effect is a range of electronic sounds that change, from left to right and in intensity to tell you about your surroundings.
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