Last week, En Tung and I decided to focus on the breathing and the experience of using the device with graphics on P5. This week, our goal is to figure out the duration from breath-in to breath-out, and assign the duration to reflect leaves growing on P5. Also, when people take off the device, leaves all fall down at once. We also want to use some kind of indicator to guide people to breath.
Figuring out what kind of interactions make sense for the breathing practice was an interesting process. We wanted to create something intuitive. There were different variations, for example growing a few leaves every time people take a breath but not changing color. It was hard to code the some of the variations. The concept of the interaction is simple, but the details were hard to create with code. At the end, we decided to let the leaves grow every time people breath-in and breath-out, then leaves fall after people take off the device.
With the help of our professor, we got part of the code that measures the duration of breath-in and breath-out. However, the values we got were inconsistent every time we tried it out. Not sure how we figured it out, En Tung set two thresholds with two different values, and the values were the max and min of the values we got from the sensor. Then, we mapped out the value in seconds (see code below). It worked!
Arduino Code
Next, we started coding the interactions in P5 (code: https://editor.p5js.org/Jenny-yw/sketches/IUQEyAMQ_).
Wearable Breath Sensing Belt
Final Result Video
What I Learned
I learned so much from this project and collaboration with En Tung. We had a lot of ups and downs. The beginning of the project was smooth. I enjoyed working with En Tung, and motivated each other during this process. She pushed ideas through whenever I had doubts about the direction we were heading, which was really helpful for me because my weakness is to try out different ideas.
We came together on the idea and vision of the project quickly. When we dived in the details of creating intuitive interactions and figuring out how to connect the values from the sensor to P5 sketch, we encountered so many problems. The values were never consistent. Part of it was because of the serial control panel connection, and another thing is the breathing belt we made was not sturdy either because we had to put it on and take it off a lot of times.
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