MAWSE
MAWSE Accelerometer With Sound Engine
vincent leclerc

CONCEPT The idea is to create an artefact that is very similar to a computer mouse but that encourages a different use. A mouse is normally used on a flat surface and has a very direct action-reaction type of interaction. The MAWSE is more subtle.

First of all, its skin is made of silicon. At first glance, the user might interpret the object as a generic mouse and may be tempted to use it in this fashion. The problem is that it is very difficult to make it slide on a surface due to its stickiness.

The user has to try different ways to experiment with the MAWSE. I expect that the first type of interaction will be to try to squish it because of the softness of its skin. Squishing the MAWSE makes it illuminate and sends a MIDI signal telling the computer to synthetise a sound. I guess that this will satisfy most users. But there is more... The MAWSE is sensible to acceleration in a two dimensional space. An embedded 2D accelerometer constantly monitors the acceleration of the MAWSE on arbitrary X and Y axes. The acceleration of the MAWSE in space sends MIDI signals to the computer telling it to modulate the synthetised sound.

INTERACTION The reaction of the computer to such acceleration is a simple phaser effect. For now, one axis controls the modulation of the frequency, and another controls a multiplier that changes the index of modulation. The volume (0% or 90%) of the synthetised sound is controlled by the squeezing of the MAWSE (toggles a simple on/off switch).

This new form of interaction incorporates an increasingly popular type of dynamic input to computers: the gesture. Human gesture can be a very rich source of input to a computer and can greatly enhance the user’s experience in interactive environments.
      video of the MAWSE in action

TECHNICAL DETAILS The MAWSE is made of Silicon 10, a very strong & soft translucent material. It is connected to the computer using a Mini DIN 5 pins MIDI cable. The sensors are interfaced to a Basic Stamp 2 that sends a MIDI signal to a PC.
     overview of the electronics involved
     BS2 source code

The MIDI input is translated using PureData that uses it as a seed for synthetizing sound in real-time.
     PD patcher

REFERENCES There have been several projects related to this topic. Sha Xin Wei’s TGaden has gained international recognition in the field of gestural technologies. He is interested in developing garments that encourage the wearer to experiment on new forms of gesture. He incorporates various types of sensors to his weird clothes that monitor the position, speed, acceleration, etc. of the wearer and that respond to this input with visual and sonic feedback.

Other people are more concerned with functional applications of gesture recognition. At the University of California, Seth Hollar, John Kangchun Perng and Kristofer S. J. Pister recently developed a glove named The Acceleration Sensing Glove. It is made of 6 2-axis accelerometers on the fingertips and back of the hand that completely map the 26 letters of the alphabet with gesture recognition using a custom made text editor.

The Physics and Media research group at MIT Media lab developped a 3D mouse they called Fish. They named it this way because weakly electric fish use a similar mechanism to sense their environments, and because, like a fish, the sensor can navigate in a 3D environment, whereas a generic mouse spends its life in a 2D field. The fish has one transmit channel and four receive channels that sense the electromagnetic field around it.
      initial research document