EW's Blog

 A Master Thesis about Shadow Puppetry     I found another our former master student's thesis project, and it is about shadow puppetry. The title is  Virtual Puppet: Interactive Chinese Shadow Puppetry Using Microsoft Kinect V2 by Zheng Wang. His research question is to find out what can we learn from observation research from children using the virtual puppet system. And one of his main goas of his research is to raise the interest of shadow puppetry in new generations.      In the chapter of Literature Review, he introduces the history of Chinese shadow puppetry and  shadow puppetry in the digital era. First, he briefly talks about crisis of Chinese shadow puppetry which there are very few people to inherit this special technique. Second, he presents the existing  applications of digital puppetry.  Puppet Parade  by team Design I/O, "We Be Monster" by Caitlin Boyle and Asa Foster, a shadow puppetry game by Leo Chen and Ryan Chen....

 Shadow Puppetry(Shadow Play)     Shadow puppetry is one of Chinese folk arts, it uses cut-out shapes and the shadow of the shapes to perform the play. Also, there is a saying that shadow puppetry is the ancestor of the modern film and opera.      The craftsman is commonly use animal skins to create these beautiful figures and color the figures with special pigments that have good effects under the projection of light.      If people who familiar with 2D skeleton animation, they will find out shadow puppetry is very similar to that  technology. They both separate a big figure into small parts and control each part of the figure individually.  Also I found two games that use these special art style. The first game is Projection: First Light. Projection: First Light is a indie 2D platformer and puzzle game, it creates a special visual experience through the art style of shadow puppetry. The core mechanic of the game is the manipu...

Chinese Paper Cutting      This is 12 Chinese Zodiac. It is a very common things in China and some other countries. The concept of it is kind similar to the Astrological sign, but it is assigned by the year instead of month. By the way, my Zodiac is Rat, and it is the begin sign of the 12 Chinese Zodiac.    The empty space inside of the each images can be redesigned into the touch area of the sensor. It big shape of the image will stay the same.          I think Astrological sign will work as well just like Chinese Zodiac.     Here are the other images from the Chinese paper Cutting.

 Chinese Knot     Chinese Knot is one of the art forms of Chinese culture, and it represents a good wishes of wealth, happiness and good health. It also is made of fabric and I feel like it might be possible to combine the sensor with it.   

 Work Plan Week 1 - 2: Pattern Research and AR/VR Project Research. Week 3 : Pattern/Image Design, Sensor Pad Layout Design and Basic UI/UX Design Base on Sensor and Image. Week 4: UX design and create project demo(Unity). Week 5 : UX design, create Art works and animations(2D or 3D). Write thesis draft. Thesis writing Week 6: Continue animations and start to learn Open Sound Control and Passing Sensor Data Between PC and Phone and Implement OSC into Unity.  Thesis writing Week 7: Add animations into the scene and create new demo for pilot test.  Week 8: Analyze the result of pilot test and adjust the demo. Week 9: TBD.

 Research of Pattern       The patterns on the CTS is the only indications of how the pad can be interact. And it is using the multiple simple patterns, such as rectangle, triangle and circle. I feel like these patterns are kind boring, they do not have specially meaning in them. So, I think maybe I can use some meaningful pattern to design the layout for the sensor.      When I talked these to my advisor Professor Polyak about meaningful patterns, he recommended Chinese Paper Cutting. (Figure.1) In Chinese Paper Cutting, it gives simple patterns special meanings, such as Sun, Moon and Water Drop. These kind complicate images on the right side of Figure.1 are formed by the repetition of simple patterns. And simple patterns can be modify as the input area of CTS. It can transform a  digital controller into a beautiful artwork. Figure.1     Besides Chinese Paper Cutting, there are other types of fabric artworks. Like Chinese trad...

 My Research     Usability Study of Fabric-Based Sensors as Interactive Input Devices in Augmented and Virtual Reality Experiences.     Keywords: Fabric-Based Sensor, Capacitive Sensor, UI, Unity, AR and VR. The Capacitive Touch Sensor (CTS)     The name of the fabric-based sensor that I am currently using is The Capacitive Touch Sensor(CTS). It is created by Vallett Richard who is a electrical engineering PHD student as Drexel University, and it was his master project. Currently, he is working at Center for Functional Fabric. They have some pretty cool projects, such as haptic glove. Here is the link to the website:  https://drexel.edu/functional-fabrics/research/projects/      Here is the description of the sensor from the website. "The Capacitive Touch Sensor (CTS) is a gesture sensitive functional textile touch-pad interface for physical devices. The CTS is produced as a single piece of fabric requiring only two electr...