In a piano lesson, a student often imitates the teacher's playing in terms of speed, dynamics, and fingering. While this learning model leverages one's visual and even audial perception for emulation, it still lacks an important component of piano playing - the tactile sensation. We seek to convey the tactile sensations of the teacher's keystrokes and then signal the student's corresponding fingers. We implemented an instrumented fingerless glove called Tactile Teacher to detect finger taps on hard surfaces. Since finger taps generate acoustic signals and cause vibrations, we embedded three vibration sensors on the glove and use machine learning algorithms to analyze the data from the sensors. After a brief training procedure, this prototype can accurately identify single finger tap in a very good performance at above 89% accuracy, and two finger taps resulted in accuracy around 85%.
Welcome to ACME lab! A Creativity Machine Environment! We like the acronym of ACME, since it means the highest point, and also refers to the fictional company in Looney Tunes, which is A Company that Makes Everything! Why creativity machine? We believe everyone can be creative because everyone has the ability to make things. Why machine? Human beings are wonderful, intricate machineries! In the efforts to understand human intelligence and creativity (cognition), or how people design everything (from their meals, to furniture, house, or software programs), we build models and machines (theory and model) to attempts to explain, and simulate, or to explore the boundaries of these ideas that are inside blackboxes.
What do we do? We are interested in everything about design computing and cognition! From ambient intelligence to physical computing, from sketch understanding to intuitive design tools, from web log analysis to social networking, from patient communication systems to ubiquitous computing, from interactive furniture to architectural robotics, just to name a few.
