I tried to trace back what I have done and came across in this area. In the beginning was the off-line media, i.e. kiosk, CD-ROMs, etc. The Macromedia Director is the authoring tool of choice. I didn’t use the Authorware or the Quark’s mTropolis. Quark now has another software, called the Interactive Designer. Besides working on the regular CD-ROM based material, I often searched for interesting free or trial version of xtras from the Internet. There was a Director user group mailing list in London which I subscribed. One of the nice things for Director is the availability of those xtras which extend the existing functions, even for hardware. I remember a classmate used to author in Director to control a slide projector. In our final graduation show, I used a trial version of quickcam xtras (I might forget the exact name) to display a grid live images taken from the webcam at different points of time. There was a CD-ROM called V-SEQ that used the live capture as input to sequence images as an early day VJ tool.
The second xtras came to me was the serial port xtras which bridges the host computer running Director and other micro-controller devices. The first project I came across was the AudioROM’s installation. When I came back to Hong Kong, I worked on a project with Hung Keung to interface three video projections with a number of infra-red sensors using the serial port xtras in Director.
In subsequent projects, I found that it could be costly to custom make an interface whenever we needed a physical interaction design. The general purpose EZIO board is one of the flexible choices that can communicate well through the serial port xtras. EZIO, however, does not reduce the use of other physical sensors.
An EZIO board image from http://www.ezio.com
Camera based sensing is another choice. I used the TrackThemColors xtras in one of the project with Kwan Ng in Macau. The first time when Director released its getPixel() command and together with the xtras, it was possible to do simple colour comparison at pixel level. It is straight forward to do a pixel colour test and uses it as an optical sensor. But the TrackThemColors xtras does much more than this. A free version webcamxtra, i.e. the JMyron, is another good choice for simple tracking.
to be continued …