Interface Design for D-TV Browsing & Navigation System
Television / Computer convergence is technologically complete, which makes the TV industry hard for no-technical people to understand. And the viewers are still satisfied with ‘good old fashioned’ linear video for TV. To design an efficient way of massive video content browsing system, we have done background and user research. By analysing the results, we extract key design concepts.
To make a design concept, I made a different type of design and semi-prototype with a few kinds of digital sensor. And finally, we think out a card deck metaphor for navigation. This is ordered by time and channel controlling by vector pad which is a capacitance type force sensor. This prototype was Invited by Microsoft uxtv 08.
Simulators for LED use and arrangement
on the exterior of buildings
These days, a lot of buildings are decorated with LED. A few month ago, one of the construction companies in South Korea asked me that how to estimate the amount of LED they would need for the outside of a particular building. The company wanted to cover one whole surface of the structure with LED panelling. However, they have concerns because their budget is limited. Therefore, I decided to simulate the whole structure to test a different type of LED arrangement and estimate the amount of LED needed. In this project, I focused on how to immediately change the arrangement of LED and how to realistically show the structure in this simulation to make a final conclusion. Accordingly, I made a virtual space simulation to demonstrate the LED details on the structure and evaluate the costs much as an architect would do.
Although there were a lot of problems to solve, the most important thing to simulate realistically is a diffusion of light in the graphics. Therefore, I added a variable which means a ratio of diffused level. This ratio affects a relation of camera distance and diffused LED level wheeling a mouse wheel. So I can actually change diffused lights level immediately. After that, I observed a real LED panel to decide the correct ratio. I also tried to solve several of the problems on this simulator such as how to spread colours from bitmap images or how to set and move a camera angle as human sight does or how can I make a real-time 3D mapping texture.
It was meaningful project for me because I could also think about how to relate digital media to real world. I realised that budgets, engineering, and working processes are also very important.
Nowadays, presentation has become a very important part of business acumen. Although the style of presentation doesn’t always represent the company’s purpose, it is increasingly a very important part of any company. Occasionally I’ve designed for a company’s presentation and when I work on this kind of project, I have to program a similar history pattern. Therefore, I decided to design a group of classes for designing a presentation and I have developed them.
With this aim in mind my classes work with the imagination of a whole interaction structure which involves story line, bitmap, motion, movie, sound, light, using digital media, it would give an atmosphere which contains certain meanings such as aura, like visiting a familiar house.
This sketch is a visual information graph: the object’s shape and colour are changed by information. A funny thing is that I didn’t add any graphic image to make a shape and colour, this was not entirely my invention, the colour code came from Adobe Kuler, which is a famous open colour community, acquired by using proper search words and, the shapes of the objects came from my personal household account database. And when you change the perspective of the view; it shows each different tag with the information. However, it also shows the images as they are changed. I find this an attractive and user friendly aspect of digital media and I hope it works for other people.
When I worked for The Mobile Middleware Company, I had to suggest a different type of image browsing pattern. Although my graduation thesis was a visual communication design, I didn’t want to focus on graphic elements too much. At that time, I wanted to make a more functional and changeable work piece to show an image browsing pattern. Accordingly, I made a simulator which can be customised by a designer and open a possibility for my team. However, most of the designers in our team cannot program a computer language. Therefore, I had to divide several functions and make them controllable with GUI. For that reason, I set up several trigonometry, images, camera and camera target and then I linked them with GUI. Each result of the simulator records their parameters and efforts. Therefore an engineering team also can easily look at the history and refer back when creating each new pattern. Afterwards, It became a very useful tool for my work.
