3Way Communicator
Summary:3Way Communication is a web page that imitates a multi-user messenger/message board. It uses JavaScript to convert all textual inputs into musical tones and color patters and uses SQLite (provided by glitch.com)as back-end medium to store and fetch data.
Details:The motivation of 3WayCommunicator came from The Interactive Light Studio (ILS) project established by Cooper Union students back in 2010, where it aimed to explore interactive ways to help hearing impaired studetns to perceive sound. Most of the projects created in the Interactive Light Studio dealth with relating different properties of sound, such as frequency and amplitude, to the color spectrum.
Organizations like the National Orchestra of Wales and the Museo Del Prado(Spanish National Museum) have made interesting approaches to help bridge the gap between the hearing impaired/visually impaired community and the hearing/sighted community. For example, the National Orchestra of Wales had set up concerts with sound boxes to allow hearing impaired people to experience sound by directly feeling the vibration; Museo Del Prado had displayed art works with special textures to allow the visually impaired people to experience art work through their sense of touch.
It was interesting to consider alternatives to these methods. What if the hearing impaired people can experience a concert through visual patterns? Similarly, what if the visually impaired people can experience a piece of art work through music? This project serves as a testing ground, a first step, to this concept.
The goal of this project is to take people away from their usual comfort zone in online communication, text, and instead uses color and/or musical patterns as the main tool for communication.
The user input is gathered thrugh textual input, and submitted through forms. Before the input is stored, it is converted to color patterns and as well as to musical tones via the two function snippets shown below:
The input is split and stored in an array and each alphabet/number is mapped to a specific color and to a specific tone. The blank spaces are being mapped to the background volor of the text box in the color conversion function, and to a pause in the tone conversion function.
The converted input is then stored using SQLite, an open source provided on glitch.com. Since the project did not use API such as webSocket to update messages from multiple users, it was necessary for the site to constantly fetch data to update the display. By converting the input first then storing, it provides some optimization in loading speed of the website, as the site does not have to convert the input everytime it reloads to update the message board.