Andy Li's Blog

This my my final project for the course “Interactivity I”. For this final project, my aim is to explore the vector nature of sound wave while making a tool to let people create their own waveform which can then be saved for other use.

The waveform in the program consists of 10 control points. The first point and the last point are fixed at zero so that the wave can be looped smoothly to form a sound wave. The controls points can be adjusted by dragging or by using keyboard. The points are assigned with keys labeled near them, which are number keys (+shift to move points up instead of down). I recommend using the keyboard as you may adjust multiple points at the same time (which feels like using multitouch surface ).

Degrafa is used to construct the wave form. I choose to use cubic bezier curve as it is easier for me to implement the algorithm (with the still-in-beta AdvancedCubicBezier which available via SVN).

The 3D cylinder is made by Flash Player 10′s 3D API. It looks quite nice as similar to landscapes.

Sound is synthesized dynamically in real-time (with some delay… okay? ). If you hear some “clicks” or “pops”, try to export the sound first by clicking on the export button at the bottom-right corner (it will be in wav format, encoded by the WavEncoder from popforge) .

If you hear nothing, you may try to increase the buffer size or use the export function.

source

Just a few days ago, I went to CityU’s brand new Usability Testing Lab to do usability testing for my assignment. It is located in InnoCentre (Kowloon Tong), on the 5th floor, inside Department of Media and Communication. I searched around InnoCentre for so long since Dr. Andy Chun (Yup, another Andy) forgot to say which room the lab is located…

For the lab, I am a little bit disappointed, since it is actually only a little room. But the Department of Media and Communication is great. There are many other special rooms (or labs) for recording, broadcasting etc. And the technician who guided me through using the equipment is really nice.

The special computer used for usability testing.

My site has been tested two times while I also help testing another group’s web site. What we have got were some heatmaps, eye-tracking videos, and some simple software analysis (interesting areas on pages etc.). I think it seems to be too little data for me, but there were no time and people left to do more testing.

Actually what I am interested is booking the lab for testing games… There was already a XBox 360 located in the room and the technician kept asking us to play… It will be good to let me try testing my forthcoming games, but may be I will never have a chance to come back since the lab is not opened for students normally…

CityU News screen dump

In this morning I have just finished the Transmedia Exchange Presentation with my group-mates. That was just a tiny scale of presentation, which most of the audiences were BScCM students.

There were reporters from COMO (Communications Office of City University of Hong Kong) and CM. We presented in this morning and there is article on CityU home page now… They acted so fast! Below is the link…

SCM instructor wins award at major cyber art competition – CityU News

Opss, the article title has nothing related to our trip… But Keith’s Moving Mario is really great…