CHS: Medium: Design Tools for Physical Computing Objects

CHS：媒介：物理计算对象的设计工具

• 批准号: 1406578
• 负责人: Michael Jones
• 金额: $ 112.36万
• 依托单位: Brigham Young University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-08-01 至 2021-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1406578&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CHS; Medium; Design; Tools; Physical

As computers decline in cost and interactive computation moves off of the desktop, computation can assume a variety of physical forms. At present, the creation of new computer interfaces is limited to already-available formats, such as smartphones, and even then is constrained to relatively simplistic computer interfaces. Computing in the future will push beyond desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones into objects that fit into every part of our lives. But for this to happen, design tools are needed that can rapidly adapt computing to different physical forms and task needs. This project will study toolkits for the development of interactive physical objects. The project will increase national competitiveness in the invention and development of new uses of computation, and make possible rich and diverse usability research with physical computing objects in the wild rather than in the lab. Creating physical computing objects will allow a greater proportion of society to use computers in ways that fit their work requirements in fundamentally new ways. The rapid design and creation of such devices will open new markets for consumer computing.These ends are achieved through three interrelated efforts: (1) A pluggable toolkit for creating sensor/actuator systems that form the computational basis for such objects. This toolkit will be unique in that the components when plugged together not only form an initial prototype of the device but self-reveal their physical and computational characteristics to automatically support the other design tools. A prototype constructed with this toolkit will inherently contain sufficient information to drive its own fabrication. By plugging together the prototype our tools will automatically know how to perform a custom fabrication of the electronics at a size that can be readily deployed. (2) Development of physical form via 3D printing such that the physical shape, sensors and actuators integrate with the software and electronics so as to easily prototype a complete physical/computational object. One goal is to suppress the challenges of mechanical design so that designers can focus on shape and usability. (3) Interactive machine learning techniques will be created to easily develop the mapping between human activities (as detected by sensors) and their recognition in software. It is known that putting humans in the training loop for machine learning changes the way training sets are built. Algorithms will be developed that both adapt to and exploit this behavior. This project will produce new knowledge of the concepts that are most difficult for designers when creating physical computational objects.

随着计算机成本的下降和交互式计算离开桌面，计算可以采取各种物理形式。目前，新的计算机界面的创建仅限于已经可用的格式，例如智能手机，即使如此，也被限制为相对简单的计算机界面。未来的计算将超越台式机、笔记本电脑、平板电脑和智能手机，成为适合我们生活各个部分的物体。但要做到这一点，需要设计工具，可以快速适应计算不同的物理形式和任务需求。本项目将研究开发交互式物理对象的工具包。该项目将提高国家在发明和开发计算新用途方面的竞争力，并使在野外而不是实验室中使用物理计算对象进行丰富多样的可用性研究成为可能。创建物理计算对象将允许社会中更大比例的人以全新的方式使用计算机，以满足他们的工作需求。这些目标通过三个相互关联的努力来实现：（1）用于创建传感器/致动器系统的可插拔工具包，这些系统构成了此类对象的计算基础。该工具包的独特之处在于，组件插入在一起时不仅形成了设备的初始原型，而且还自我揭示了它们的物理和计算特性，以自动支持其他设计工具。使用该工具包构建的原型将固有地包含足够的信息来驱动其自身的制造。通过将原型连接在一起，我们的工具将自动知道如何以易于部署的尺寸进行电子产品的定制制造。(2)通过3D打印开发物理形式，使物理形状，传感器和致动器与软件和电子产品集成，以便轻松制作完整的物理/计算对象的原型。一个目标是抑制机械设计的挑战，使设计师可以专注于形状和可用性。(3)将创建交互式机器学习技术，以轻松开发人类活动（由传感器检测）与软件识别之间的映射。众所周知，将人类置于机器学习的训练循环中会改变训练集的构建方式。将开发算法来适应和利用这种行为。这个项目将产生新的知识的概念是最困难的设计师在创建物理计算对象。