| Summary: | This report describes a master’s thesis project in industrial design engineering at Luleå University of Technology (LTU), conducted on behalf of the Computer Science Division at LTU. As part of the European research project COMPEIT, the objective of this thesis project was to design and build a working product prototype that can convey a presence between remote locations. Studies of related projects have been conducted along with frameworks for tangible interactions, ambient displays, and strategies on mediating relatedness. Moreover, theories of communication, emotions, and Internet emotions have been examined together with theories of form, user-experience design, and emotional design. Backcasting and experience prototyping have been the overall strategy for the project’s scenario-based design process. Furthermore, design workshops for generating ideas have been conducted with user tests that examine the possibility of transmitting emotions by using light and color animations. The outcome differed depending on the emotional animation, but the result showed a potential to channel emotions using light animations. Based on the said research and user tests, a model on how to design for conveying a presence has been proposed. This model describes how awareness and presence relate to implicit and explicit communication along with abstract and concrete information. The final result of this project is a functional prototype of “Tangiball,” which consists of two intelligent lamps combined with a web application. The lamps are equipped with a microcontroller, a small video camera, a microphone, and two LED units, each consisting of several individually controllable NeoPixels, allowing Tangiball to show light and color animations. The lamps are equipped with Wi-Fi, enabling Internet communication. The web application consists of four functions: conveying presence by recording video at one location and visualizing it abstractly using light and color at another, sending pre made emotional light and color animations to the ...
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