My first order of business was to get my box finished. I decided that the sides were too tall, so I wanted to put them from the 12 inch dimension down to eight inches. to do this I had to remove the brackets and drill some new holes, and do some shopping. Aside from that, All I really needed to do was iron on the edging of the box and paint the frame!

 

 

 

 

My first stop was Home Depot, where I purchased a circular saw and a saw guide to help with the cutting. I also bought some silicone while I was there to make sure that any gaps in the wood would be covered and have a nice, tight seal, keeping the sand in the box and the gallery floor a little cleaner.

Below is what the box looked like after I cut some of the inches off the sides. The proportions are much better now, it will contain the 5-6 inches of sand that I plan to have in the box, and I think it will feel less constraining and more inviting to interaction since the audience won’t have to reach over the previously confining walls as much anymore. I sanded it down so that I could iron on the melamine siding, and then I painted the brackets so they might be less obtrusive. It seems a little unnecessary now, but I couldn’t help myself. I started painting the base of the table with white spray paint, and after a second coat (which will likely be applied later tonight) I think it will be done!

Next up is some of the computer stuff I’ve been working on. I’ve managed to create an addition that completely changed what my program looked like, I’ve been trying to recalibrate my system because all I’ve been able to get to show up is a field of white instead of blue. The blue was showing up previously as a reading error, the Kinect believed that the sand it was viewing was much farther away than it should have been. I managed to change how it perceived the sand, but instead it went to the opposite spectrum and decided that everything was much closer than it should have been. As you can see in the second picture, the white fields are what the kinect sees in regard to the sand surface, and the range of color is supposed to be applying itself essentially to where the white colorfield is as opposed to below the colorfield. I consider this progress, however, as I haven’t been able to change the spectrum previously. I think my next calibration will hopefully yield better, more accurate results.

 

The response time was a little slow, I was getting about a second of lag, so I purchased a better graphics card to supplement my motherboard, and had to learn how to change my BIOS settings to allow all of my ports to function properly as well as set up a dual-monitor situation, which I sort of need for this set up.

 

 

 

 

I think I’ve decided on the aesthetic I’m going with for my process book, and this might end up being the cover. It’s meant to resemble a motherboard and a processor, mostly because my experience with this project constantly circled around technology and how to interact with it. I thought about printing it onto sandpaper and having the white parts laser-cut into the cover, but I wasn’t sure if that would be too silly or end up being destructive to other objects.

So the only thing I didn’t get done was implementing some form of Easter Egg into the software, mostly because of all of the errors that have been popping up and needing my attention but also because of other issues that I’ve been having with the materials and the project in general. For example, my projector cable broke and I had to find and purchase a new cord for it so I could test out the projections on the sand, and it was much harder to locate than I realized. Also, some of the sand that I had thought I’d acquired ended up getting lost in the mail, and after about two weeks of relay between myself, the seller, and the delivery company I was refunded and had to find a new distributor. The rest of my sand is on it’s way, and each box has it’s own tracking number this time (previously they were strapped together and shared tracking numbers, but one of the cases came apart) so there’s that.