For this project, I wanted to investigate tangible feedback with the Kinect.

My initial idea was to have a glove with an Arduino that uses an accelerometer to actuate a small vibrating motor when a particular gesture is recognized and have this be detected simultaneously via the Kinect.

When I did some searching, I found that similar work had been done before for the Hug t-shirt and an audio generating glove (in my last post).

I figured creating a fireball/Hadouken should be simple enough to let the hand moving backward gesture signify an increase in energy (so vibration) and moving forward a decrease in energy (so a decrease in vibration). The goal was to investigate whether having that feedback had any effect at all.

I had issues with the accelerometer deteching gestures which turned out to be good. I get to thank Asim Mittal for suggesting using the Serial Port to communicate between the Arduino and machine. I ended up finding a library ofSerial & ofSerialSimple that let me send data bytes back and forth between my Arduino and OpenFrameworks. So visually, I didn’t spend much time on the Hadouken so this was pretty simple. But when I did first get the glove running, it was pretty cool because the motor feedback is effective.

So I dont have an in-class demo because the Lilypad did get fried and another one is on its way. But I do have a video I managed to take. Despite how I look, I actually did have fun with this project :) .

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsMf7qm_qx4]

I think this can go further. So, I just got a pulse sensor and I think getting that data back and plugging it in could be interesting. I also think the Hadouken/Fireball was great to start simple but I’d be interested in ideas about making the visuals more appealing and engaging with this sort of feedback.