Alan Olsen and Jess Rose created an interface that allowed the user to put together a sequence of animations, and allowed the user to playback that sequence. Alan made a robot avatar that would act out the animation sequence playback on the computer screen. Jess left for graduate school, elsewhere, at the end of the semester [of Winter 2009].

Spring 2009, in spite of Pleo's maker (Ugobe) going out of business, Alan Olsen and Alan Atherton were able to figure out how to communicate with Pleo. More information on how to do this can be found, here.

Alan Olsen then adapted the interface to communicate with the Pleo dinosaur robot. It demonstrated animating Pleo (by right-clicking the icon of an animation), playing an animation sequence on Pleo (the program would tell Pleo to play an animation then, once Pleo replied that it was done with the animation, the program would send the next animation to play, etc), and responding to sensors on Pleo (Pleo would tell the program if a sensor was pressed, then the program would tell Pleo what animation to play).

Alan also created a program that would run on Windows Mobile (i.e. a Smartphone or Pocket PC) for remote control purposes. Adding the cellphone icon to the animation sequence (see image above) would pause the sequence at that point and ask the user, on the Windows Mobile device, if it should repeat the last animation, or continue with the animation sequence.

'''Interface Design Process''' (explained in Alan's Thoughts on "Developing User Interfaces" by Dan Olsen):

• Task Analysis
• Functional Model
• Presentation
• Interactive Porthole
• Actions

By the end of August, Alan Olsen created this GUI that allows the user to script sequences for any TiLAR robot.

Open for further discussion…

« Alan's Thoughts