Iris

This is the logo for a toolset I developed, called Iris. In mythology, Iris was messenger of the gods during the Trojan War. Perhaps a little presumptuous, but appropriate in my humble opinion. You can find out more about the mythological figure Iris here. The second reason for calling the toolset Iris is the shape of the activity visualiser in the client. I'll get to that later. You can use this story either to look for help on Iris or just to learn about it in general.

Basic Layout

Iris consists mainly of four components:
1 A client on everyone's computer for monitoring activity and for simple visual interaction between other users and the whiteboard
2 The Sticky Board, a projected and shared whiteboard
3 Arthur, a robot built from Lego Mindstorms, for playful interaction and taking pictures of physical objects
4 And finally a server for managing network messaging and keeping track of activity levels.

Everything was programmed in Macromedia Director and runs on both Windows 98 or higher and Mac OS X 10.2 or higher. For optimal performance, a system with a clockspeed over 500MHz is recommended; in other words, you'll hardly know it's running, except when you want to know.

On your desktop

When you run the Iris-client for the first time, you'll see the login screen. By clicking on the field where it says "put your name here", you can enter the name others will see. For now, the field for the server-address is locked. When you're done, all you have to do is click the big blue button and you'll never have to see this again; except if you want to make changes.

From outside to inside, the client has three groups of buttons. The four outermost buttons are, starting top left going clockwise, for respectively quitting, minimizing, help (this page) and connection settings. The upper half circle is a visualistion of the current activity of present users. To me the upper half resembles the human iris. It also functions for displaying the names of all people present. The lower half circle shows the six last pictures (slowly rotating) which have been sent to the Sticky Board. The left yellow button is for changing the mode of the visualisation and the right button will display the whiteboard. Finally the centre-button enables the user to take pictures en put them on the Sticky Board.

The visualisation runs in four modes, one is dynamic and the other three are static. The visualisation of the current activity is animated and will show more yellow as activity is higher. The static visualisations show the activity over time; last hour in steps of two minutes, the last day (actually last 15 hours) and the last week. Their respective color can be different, depending whether activity has been below or above average, ranging from bright yellow to bloody red.

Hovering the mouse over the upper half circle will display the names of the people currently present. It will only fit twelve names at a time. However, you can grab these names by clicking on them and cycle through them by dragging either left or right. If there are less than twelve names, the names will be repeated throughout the cycle like in the picture.

When you hold the mouse over the lower display, it will turn yellow and display who sent the picture and, if present, the comment with it. Here it is possible as well to grab the pictures and rotate them by dragging left or right. By dragging up or down you can pull the picture onder your mouse towards you, for a more detailed look. If you'd want even more detail, press the blue button to the left (display the number of new photos since last time you checked) and go to the Sticky Board.

Pressing the center button (opening the aperture), will bring you to the framing mode. The framing mode works like a magnifying glass. You can pick up the frame everywhere, except from down-left (take the picture) and top-right (cancel), and move it to anywhere you like. Pressing a and z will respectively zoom in and out. Updating occurs by pressing the spacebar. When you're satisfied, close the aperture, by pressing the bottom left button.

The last action brings you to the Sticky Board, with a picture-sticky attached to your mouse. After clicking the mouse, the sticky no longer moves, and you may type a message underneath your name. When you're done, you can confirm by clicking the green button or cancel using the orange button.

Sticky Board

The Sticky Board is a projection on the TRI setup, developed by Ianus Keller. Because the the TRI setup is also used for other work, the Sticky Board is used as the desktop background, though you can move the Sticky Board to the front, by activating the Sticky Board application.

With each new post, the Sticky Board slowly fades away as though being covered by a fine mist. The depth of field effect created by the fading shows the history of Stickies.

Arthur

Arthur is a small robot, which can track movement and move around, expressing the activity of the community. You may find Arthur in the hallway near the staircase at the 2nd floor of the ID StudioLab.

By holding something in front of Arthur, you can put it onto the Sticky Board and share it with the community. When Arthur detects enough motion, he will show it's view mirrored with a white progressbar. Now to make a post, you have to keep moving in front of Arthur; the progressbar will shrink and after 5 seconds of consecutive motion, Arthur will show the current picture. To update the picture, just keep on moving. When you're done, hold still for a second and Arthur will create a sticky for you with the last shown picture and add a random comment.

Arthur moves around from time to time to express the activity of the community. When things are busy, Arthur will move more often en longer distances. When things are quiet, Arthur slowly descends back to his starting position, until moving again.

personal project iris
Last update: Saturday, March 26, 2005 at 2:28:08 AM.