Fallback Projects

If your team has been having difficulty coming up with project ideas and you would prefer to pick a project from a more specific list and be given much more specific directions on what to build, here are some options. We will help you to spec out the interface should you chose one of these.

Option 1: Pupil Dilation Tricorder App

The eye is a window into the body, and much can be learned about someone's physiological state by measuring pupil dilation response. For this app, you would build a pupil dilation measurement system. You would need to use the phone's camera and do a little bit of image processing. The goal would be to build an app that will measure "pupillary response." You can learn about pupillary response and see an example here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pupillary_response.

Your app would need to do some (but not all) of the following:

• Measure the size of the pupil at a specific moment.
• Compare the size of the pupil at one specific moment to a subsequent time.
• Determine if the pupil is round.
• Compare the size of the right and the left pupils.
• Determine aspects of the change in pupil size in response to light (from the flash).

You would be given some additional details about the GUI and how it might work. The challenge would be to integrate the image processing and the user interaction to create an app that accomplishes the goal of measuring pupil size and/or change with an interface that is straightforward to use.

This project is well-suited for a person/team that wants to focus on an app with a minimal GUI but with more sophisticated sensing.

Option 2: Label My Day

In this project you will build an application that makes it very easy for someone to label what they do throughout the entire day. The app would ultimately be used to help train software that would learn about your patterns of behavior (although you won't build that part, just the interface for gathering the behavior information). The goal is to make it trivial for someone to inform the phone of what activities the person is doing, and when those activities started and stopped.

For this app you would need to do a lot of work with the Google speech recognition APIs, and you would need a nice user interface that makes it easy for someone to break up the day into chunks based on the accelerometer in the phone.

If you choose this option, we will explain the details, but your app would do the following:

• Monitor the accelerometer for times when the phone goes from mostly stationary to mostly moving.
• Trigger the phone to prompt for input.
• Listen for what someone says and parse the input.
• Use a nicely developed UI to make it very easy for someone to confirm what they are doing and provide both text-to-speech and visual feedback.
• Allow someone to adjust the start/stop times of various activities.

This project idea is well-suited for a person/team that wants to focus on an app that continuously waits for input from the user and operates in quick bursts of interaction throughout the day to accomplish a specific task.

Option 3: Motion Simon Exergame

In this project you would build an exergame much like the classic memory game, Simon, but instead of pressing buttons, the players move the phone in certain ways, using a small set of primitive motions that are easy to detect using the motion sensor. The feedback in the game will be primarily through audio. The game will also have a two player mode that uses Bluetooth. The game will become physically and mentally difficult quickly.

This idea is good for a person/team that wants to focus on an app that has a fast-paced game-like experience.

Option 4: Mystery Dance Exergame

In this project you would build an exergame that gets people moving the phone in specific ways, doing a "mystery dance" that is defined by another player. The game would use the motion sensor in the phone and generate sounds based on the motion of the phone in real time (which may require the use of PureData or another sound toolkit, or custom sound programming). As the phone moves in particular ways, the sound will change in predictable ways. One player will need to listen and match the movements (using sound) of the other player (or of previously recorded game experiences). This game would be similar to the Motion Simon Exergame in some ways, but it will have a more unusual feel. The game is less of a memory game and more of a fast-paced motion game focused on two-player, simultaneous interaction (although with a single-player mode).

This idea is good for a person/team that wants to focus on an app that has a fast-paced game-like experience and uses sound and motion in an innovative way.