Mentor Feedback & Review

Shaun Kane

After showing Shaun a short demo and having him test out what I have thus far for my haptic wearable audio transfer device and before he gave feedback, he said:

Meeting with Shaun while all my elements were working made for a much more productive meeting for feedback, and suggestions. Shaun suggested elements to add to my jacket that I hadn’t considered before. One element that particularly stood out to me was working with changing the materials on the outside of the vibrating motors even within the jacket - such as bristles, erasers or a small balloon. The reasoning behind this, he said, was because then instead of only having the vibrations to base which frequency was associated with which vibrating motor, the feeling of the material would help as well. Additionally, he mentioned that I should consider conducting a systematic study to see if making the vibrating motors fixed to their locations or allowing the user to change the placement of the vibrating motors would make a difference to the user, and if so, how? It is something key to consider especially to make the clothing article able to be washed. This is when I suggested the idea of potentially having the motors attached to a piece of fabric that either is Velcro-ed or buttoned into the inner lining of the jacket so the electronics could be removable. Furthermore, he said that working even more to make a more distinguishable vibration from low to medium frequencies as it wasn’t as prevalent as he was hoping for.

Another overarching theme of some of the feedback he had was to allow the user to have more control over the different frequency ranges. For instance, the frequencies used in classical music are much different from those felt with dubstep, so allowing the user to customize their experience may allow them to enjoy the music/vibrations more. He mentioned the possibility of having a few different presets that the user can select from to allow the vibrating motors to be changed based off of the genre of music playing. He joked and said, “Now, that could turn into a big monster if everyone can change everything. It would be nice to have, but maybe for if you were to continue this project after graduation.” I laughed and agreed as that seemed like a beast I was not ready to tackle with what I have left to complete. However, he did mention the idea of using Logic Pro to allow the user to play notes on a keyboard and have the jacket respond in real time to the notes they press. This would be doable as the jacket would only need to be plugged into the source where the music would be coming from. This is definitely an idea to keep in mind for user testing, the final presentation, and EXPO.

A big piece of advice he had for me was to potentially make a small video tutorial of how to use the jacket or even make a step-by-step integrate different elements of a song onto the jacket so the user doesn’t feel overwhelmed too fast. He mentioned that having him go from not experiencing anything like it to immediately the Eye of The Tiger was overwhelming. He suggested starting with something simple like nursery rhymes (Ba Ba Black Sheep) and then progressively adding more sounds and more complicated songs after that. He suggested that having the user get used to the system first will allow for more accurate and reliable results from user testing and in the future for the final device.

Shaun mentioned many of his students that have worked a lot with Arduino and have been successful, so he will get me in touch with a few of them to help with troubleshooting errors. One of his students, Anika, has been doing a lot of work with wearables and accessibility so she would probably love to demo it.

As we were discussing how I was thinking about integrating the vibrating motors into the Bomber jacket, he suggested one more thing:

That idea is definitely something interesting I am going to have to try out!