What a Place to Live!

This is the first time the Interactive Charity Engine gets a proper fabricated box and deployed at the Fun@IDA event on 25 April 2008. It was an event that the IDA held for their internal staff at the Suntec Rock Auditorium. The Interactive Charity Engine was there to help to raise funds from the attendees for the Chesire Home.

This time round, I thought it could be interesting to have a visualiser to see the number of contributions made throughout the event…

I finally managed to get myself compiling the videos I got for the Interactive Charity Engine after more than a week of procrastination since the entry I posted about the Project Show. Here’s the video…

Just an overview about what the project is all about, the Interactive Charity Engine is a project that I have developed for my graduation project. It has a projected public display, which could be interacted through a multi-touch screen booth. The display takes inputs from public contributions into a donation box. The screen allows loading of other “themes” or displays to receive the inputs.

The aim of this project is to improve the traditional way of soliciting donation funds and encourage contributions through visual incentives and interesting human computer interactions.

Finally after all these days, Tuesday (18th March) had come and is now officially over(not really in some bit though, in some ways but we will see how).

Tuesday was the Project Show in school. That’s kind of like a graduation project exhibition but only selected ones were shown there. I don’t really like the idea that only the selected ones to be shown since I believe every student had put in a lot of efforts in their graduation projects and should have the chance to enjoy showing their work off to the public. But anyways, my project was one of the selected ones.

My project was an Interactive Charity Engine that will respond to every coin that the people contribute into a coin box. The idea is to have it as a public installation with a large public projected display. So essentially, what the audience would see could probably an apple appearing on the screen when he puts in his coin. And the other person may see a leaf coming into the screen when another coin is put in.

I consider myself “lucky” to get selected since my project was really simple. Not many would be able to link the concept behind whatever that we have and would probably find the idea of sheer crap. I get this problem whenever I tell friends about it. Honestly, not even myself could at first until some time when I had developed to a stage where I had no choice but to continue developing.

The other thing is that I wish to implement all the research (so much thanks to this bunch of ppl) I had done in designing a multi-touch interface. I mean that’s what I had proposed for the graduation project way before even the semester started but we turned out to be doing something else and I ended up doing it as a pet project on my own. This is really something I am very very keen to do and was quite disappointed when I know I will have to do something else.

Long story short, I took the 2 weeks of preparation period that was intended for us to get our project ready to build and integrate a multi-touch booth that controls the large public display. I decided to have this idea because this is the only way I could have my multi-touch project shown together. I mean the posters, brochures and other stuff for the Interactive Charity has already been printed and it make no sense if I do a seperate project there. Those were really 2 weeks of tiring, busy, lack of sleep, torture, taxi spree, cash leakage, slow-motion suicide but yet self-fullfilling days. I am happy that my lecturer was very helpful in many ways to help getting the equipments from the school to make my this little last minute idea possible. Many other things turned out to be so much more amazing than I had thought.

Coming back to the show on Tuesday, I must say it was really out of my expectation (in a good way, of course!). My project wasn’t the best one to get the honour to present in the hall to all the guests, but it was surprisingly voted as the most favourite project during the show by the visitors and guests. I also got many responses from the crowd during the show asking questions regarding the installation, especially on the multi-touch screen, on both technical and non-technical aspects. People also find it interesting to interact on the multi-touch screen booth especially the collaborative experience where many people could interact together.

Looks like that 2 weeks of hard work and money (on materials and the outrageous taxi fares) were really worthwhile. I enjoyed the whole process from developing the project to having the crazy idea getting the multi-touch booth to preparing the installation and all the way to the last minute on Tuesday even though it was very tiring. I really feel like a wish came true or something close to that. I mean it’s the multi-touch screen! That’s what I wanted to do, isn’t it?! Ha!The only thing that could have been better was my throat. I had a bad throat on Monday and my voice is almost lost before Tuesday came. I needed my voice badly to talk on that day.

Another thing that could possibly be better is the show should last for more than a day. I mean we (the organisers and other students and people who are involved) took so many weeks to prepare but everything were torn down after less than 8 hours of exhibition in less than an hour.

Nevertheless, it has been awesome and really great!

Update: I have compiled the video of the Interactive Charity Engine.

I was arranging the files that I had to send to the guys I worked for on some games today. As I was packing the files, I saw a Flash game that I did earlier last year during my internship. I almost forgotten about this game! That was like so long ago.

I could remember that I was asked to do a maze game in Flash during the internship for one of their clients. At first, I thought the maze could look very complex and I should prepare something for that. I had the idea to make this process a more simplified one.

I started writting a set of classes that allows me to design the map and place game items on the maps. The set of classes(or rather the main thing) will calculate and handle the collision detections and renders the map. Each individual items should be an object of itself so that I could make the different items in the game to have its own properties and magical capabilities. And I can easily add the items as children of the main game by calling addChild().

Since the client did not send us the information for the game yet that time, I used the Bomberman sprites as a demonstration for them. I later was busy with some other things and didn’t have any time for this. The eventual maze game(for the client) also turned out to be a lot simpler and didn’t require any major enhancement, which was also another reason I didn’t go on to make improvements. The main reason was of course I am very very very lazy.
Click here to see the Flash file

What really beats me is how could I have forgotten about this…Bomberman was one of my favourite childhood superheroes…I even collected many sets of their models! haha!