ITP Blog

Light and Interactivity

Final Project Progress

We decided to go with a design similar to this light. Although we have some challenging ideas for the interaction and the design, we agreed that we would focus on having an MVP with a touch potentiometer and a switch, and work on the gesture detection and machine learning side of the project, if it fails still it was worth exploring and we at least will have a working project, so we don't want to invest everything on that, but I think the whole idea is appealing enough to at least try.

For now we made a quick prototype using laser-cut cardboard to see how the light would scatter and look in the middle of our fixture, and the results are interesting, I like how this shape scatters the light around it.

I also tried 3D modeling a few shapes similar to the light, we definitely want to add our own flavor to the shape and don't want to downright copy this product.

Fades

We like the idea of using fades for a smooth-feeling user interaction. The simple linear and exponential curves are fine but I wanted to explore more so I had the thought of finding a way to implement a cubic bezier curve to control the fade of the light, after many hours of coding and debugging I could arrive at a working solution that is basically a 6-point bezier curve to fade the light on and off.

Because the camera oversaturates and can not capture the proper effect of the fade, I pointed the light to a wall and tried to capture the curve as much as possible, the turning off curve is more pronounced

And here is a slow motion of the light bulb to see the effect closer

The next steps are clear, we have to start fabricating a few other prototypes with a similar shape but altered with our own tastes, and in parallel we continue working on the gesture detection, but keep the touch fader in place as a safe plan B.