Freitag, 27. Juli 2007

Conclusion

ABC gives architects a new tool to design rooms that can have different functions or have variations in the amount of people using it. The use of colors is a good way to stimulate people, but it has to be done in a non intrusive way to avoid distraction from the task at hand.

Further development

Since OLEDs are still a very intrusive way of changing the color of a room, the idea is to change the color of the wall itself. In this way regulations, restricting the lighting of a room (minimum/maximum amount of light that has to fall on a table) are dealt with more easily and also sunlight can be used to illuminate the room, which would cause problems when being brighter than the light produced by the OLEDs.
We could not find a lot of research in this area, but we could find one research project that uses temperature to affect the state of crystals embedded in the wall (http://www.astc.org/resource/exhibits/stein.htm, http://www.astc.org/resource/exhibits/stein.htm).
This is not particularly helpful for our project since we want to change the color in a rather big area of the building and the amount of heat needed to turn a whole wall red would not be a good idea. But we are confident, that there are other ways to affect the state of (a similar kind of) crystals that would help in our case.

Realization

We realized our prototype with special tiles lit by organic LEDs.
The software part is mostly done in MAX/MSP and Java.
Input is processed and classified by MAX/MSP. The classification is based on visual and auditory input. The movement and volume of the current situation is measured, normalized and the average of the last two minutes is used to ignore data blips and guarantee a slow transition from one lighting to the next.
The results of the classification is sent to the Java program using TCP/IP. From the sent data, the Java program computes the appropriate lighting scheme and controls the tiles to change to the specified color.

Idea

The basic idea of our project was to create a building that always (best case ;) ) provides a nice environment to deal with your current task. E.g. learn/communicate/relax depending on the function/settings of the room you're currently in. Since we do not see the possibility to always accommodate the needs of every individual person in a public building we focus on dealing with a group of people and the (expected) state of this group. For example we expect a group of people, coming from the cold and rainy outside to prefer an environment that projects warmth and calmity.
Since we cannot do this by changing factors like the room size itself we chose to change colors which have a huge impact on the way people perceive their environment.
The way the room changes in different situations certainly depends on the layout and function of a certain room and would have to be worked out by the architect and possibly some psychologists to reach the best solution.
Basically you can say that reddish colors produce warmth, calmity and make the room appear smaller while blue helps people to concentrate and make the room appear colder and bigger.