Smartphone Interaction Workaround
Group Members: Tyler Cooper, Neil Chulpongsatorn, Jordan Lee
The main goal of this project is to design two alternatives to Apple's "slide to unlock" patent on a smartphone. The first design will be based on gesture or multi-touch input, and the second design is a sensor-based input (i.e. accelerometer, gyroscope, light, camera).
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Software Application
Below is a video showcasing our two apps.
A. 10 Design Sketches
Below are my 10 initial ideas for alternatives to "slide to unlock". The first few sketches are more representative of practicality and efficient usage, however I progressively sketched more fun and interesting ideas as our professor mentioned to not worry so much about practicality, and think of ideas outside the box.
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(click images to expand)
Presentation & Class Feedback
Each team member selected their personal favourite initial sketches to present to the class in order to get feedback, and get an idea of what our final designs will be on.
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The sketches of mine that I presented were my favourite ones: petting a virtual pet to unlock the phone, using your phone as a steering wheel to drive and unlock the phone, and using your phone as a cowboy pistol manner where the phone tells you when to "draw" and the phone unlocks depending on how fast you drew your phone.
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The class really liked my idea of using the phone as a means of interacting with a virtual pet for the gesture/touch based app.
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For sensor input, the class liked my idea of using the phone as a steering wheel to drive, and also Tyler's idea of using the phone to tilt a ball into a hole to unlock it.
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The class had some ideas we could add for the "tilt ball in hole puzzle", such as to add more holes for security. The class also suggested we could add different interactions for the pet like feeding, bathing, etc.
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From the feedback that we got, we decided to go with the virtual pet as a our gesture-based app, and draw more refined sketches to get an idea of our final design.
B. 10 Refined Sketches
Below are 10 of the team's favourite refined sketches. For the gesture-based virtual pet app, we played around different ideas such as playing with paws in a pattern, and having the pattern be feed, brush, play, etc. However, we all really liked the idea of playing/petting the virtual pet's face as the touch interaction, because we thought it was cute and fun.
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For the sensor-based ideas, we dabbled with some ideas using the phone to drive, but in the end the group liked and decided to go with using the phone to tilt a ball into a hole, as one of our group members Tyler, had experience working with games such as that using Unity.
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(click images to expand)
Final Design Choices
Gesture-based Unlock:​
Pet virtual pet in different areas of the pet's face to unlock the phone.
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Sensor-based Unlock:
Tilt phone to roll ball in the correct hole to unlock the phone.
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(click images to expand)
Software Download & Code
Virtual Pet
Gesture-based app made using UWP in Visual Studio 2017.
How to download & run:
Make sure you have Visual Studio 17 and Windows 10 SDK installed on your computer.
Allow developer mode for Windows 10 and UWP development on Visual Studio.
Download ZIP from the GitHub repository below.
Extract and open project with Visual Studio 17 (make sure it's run by x64 bit and Local Machine).
Ball Tilt
Sensor-based app made using Unity
How to download & run:
Download and extract the ZIP file from the Google Drive link below.
Connect a mobile device (we used Android) to your computer, and move "tilt testing.apk" from the folder to your phone.
Locate the file and open. For Android, it might tell you that it is blocked due to security and safety, just click "install anyway" and open.
Summary of Contributions
Design
Original idea of petting a virtual pet on phone, which created more variations.
Pet until the pet is satisfied idea.
Suggesting different levels for ball tilt game.
Coding
Pet until pet is satisfied coding in C#
Smoother pet head tilt animations
Phone unlocked screen
Phone unlocked dog animation