Interactive Installation Design
A valuable skill set and experience in my career as a designer that I have acquired is designing Interactive Installations, devices and exhibits.
This portfolio consists of the Pittsburgh Penguins Interactive Exhibit project that I worked on during my role as an Interaction Designer at Perfect Prototype LLC and some of my academic projects including my graduate thesis project.
P I T T S B U R G H P E N G U I N S I N T E A C T I V E E X H I B I T
My Role
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Developing prototypes of the final version of the interfaces for the games which included serial communication with various sensor boards like the SerIO, Canakit board, interfacing with beam sensor and relays, wiring and testing.
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Installing OS, troubleshooting and testing computers.
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On Site installation - Setting up computers for interactive exhibit setup and going through setup checklist.
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Working for designing user manuals for all 9 interactive exhibits for the client.
As a part of their new Ice Hockey Arena in Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Penguins desired to have Interactive touchscreen exhibits to showcase the glorious championship moments in the history of the Penguins and also to have totally immersive interactive games for the kid's zone in the Arena. The solution proposed by Perfect Prototype was to have 9 interactive exhibits which included 4 touch screen interfaces, 1 jersey display connected to a backend database, 1 augmented reality exhibit and 3 games for the kid's zone.
A C T I V E B U L L E T I N - G R A D U A T E T H E S I S P R O J E C T
The concept of Active Bulletin was to develop a public communication system like a bulletin board which gives people the ability to choose the information they want to view on the system by means of body and hand gestures. Developing this system was my final graduate thesis project. Active Bulletin used camera motion detection technology coupled with open source software called Processing to build it.
The main challenge that I faced in this project was to find the most efficient interface such that it can be used by a person having no prior knowledge of this system - a system that had no or low learning curve. After a lot of explorations I came up with the idea of a simplistic interface which rolls according to the motion of passerby simultaneously teaching him how it works.
The most important part of this system is that it is built to be generic. The system has an xml backend which is connected to a website which lets the administrator upload information in form of an Image of any type. Thus information can be replaced as per need. This system was developed to be generic and open to use in any place and for any purpose where people need to interact with information broadcasted to them like in schools and colleges or office cafeterias, in restaurants to display menus, in Hotels and so on.
INTERACTIVE GRAFFITI DESIGN
The interactive graffiti was built for the Senior Design show at Philadelphia University as a way to engage people entering the exhibit by capturing their attention. The installation consisted of a camera that detected motion and a screen with a graphical display. The graffiti consisted of random objects and animations which transformed according to the motion of people walking past it that the camera captured. Every little action had a reaction in the graffiti which became the highlight of the show.
The video below shows the installation in a testing environment.
User Experience Research
Web & Mobile UX Design
Data Visualization & UI
V I E W M O R E P R O J E C T S
Thought Leadership
ALTERNATIVE INTERFACE DESIGN - NAVIGATION DEVICE FOR MAPS
This was an exploration project that was done as a part of the Innovation Design class at graduate school. The mouse interface was redesigned specifically for navigating through google maps on a desktop or laptop computer.
The device used an Arduino board with Arduino library with Processing (open source software) to build the interface. The sensors used were a joystick and a pressure sensor to calculate the input in order to pan through the map as well and zoom in and out respectively.
Below are some of the photos taken during the installation work on site.