Firefly concept and electronics.

Welcome to the Lumipendant project! It’s a collection of art projects involving interactive wearable pendants for social settings.

This is a collaboration between Michael Grant, Mark Stephenson and myself.

There is a Lumipendant Web site, Twitter and Facebook.

Lumipendant Firefly

Firefly is the first project. Your pendant will interact with other pendants, people, yourself and various data collectors. Firefly expresses its feelings with tiny firefly-light colors and patterns. If you don’t keep Firefly company and introduce it to other Fireflies it may become lonely or sad so stay social!

Firefly is more than a social meter. It will record social interaction in it’s tiny bug memory for real time metrics. It will transfer it’s memories by invisible infrared to an internet server where your social behavior can be evaluated, rendered to graphics and further social interactions can take place.

Creative Process and Technology

We’ve been meeting regularly and using BaseCamp,

We are starting software, game mechanics, testing using Michael Grant’s Kraz-Shield for Arduino.

We’ve also been talking to Doug Commons who is experimenting with foil and paper. This could easily come forward for a future project. You can see some of his experiments along side one of Michael’s shields.

This week we received the first small batch of Firefly prototype boards. They sure are beautiful don’t you think? Especially along side those lovely ribbons of SMD parts!

What’s Next?

I’ve been thinking about the software production and am thinking if we take one small bite at a time we should reduce project risk and be able to get all the needed pieces together.

Here’s a fairly rough plan of what might come forward.

We are looking for small parties and socials to bring the pendants for testing, usability testing, review, feedback and so forth. We are currently looking at bringing them to Hub Ottawa and a Pub for the initial tests.

Phase I

Pendants can detect each other. Pendants can detect shaking. Each pendant has a unique key (perhaps random seeded from first shake data).

Each pendant keeps an array of interaction with other pendants and shakes.

As each pendant interacts with more pendants, more patterns and colors are unlocked.

Phase II

Exhibitor operated data collection.

Data is collected from the devices when they come in IR contact with base stations. Base stations can relay the data to a server (lumi server) by the internet for processing.

People can attach an avatar or identity (brand or personal) to their data. Exhibit and participant graphics can be rendered.

Phase III

Sponsor operated data collection.