Text by Victoria Gray
Technicality (Part 3)
Correspondence
Question: V and O to A
What is the transmission distance of the sensors? How many sensors can run at any one time?
Answer: A to V and O
I’m not sure that the transmission distance of BLE in this context will be sufficient for your purposes (transmitting data to a computer during live performance). Usually we don’t worry about transmission distance because we are streaming data to a phone that is being worn on the body. For development purposes this is no issue but I wonder about limitations for performances.
For example, lets define ‘the performance space’ as the area in which Victoria can move around while maintaining good data signal strength to the receiver. The performance space would be limited to the transmission distance of BLE to the receiver, which ideally is located in the middle of the performance space, though obviously that may not be practical in your case. Our transmission distance is something like 15 feet, which means a 30 foot radius circle, with responsiveness dropping away toward the edge of the circle. We don’t know for sure yet, because we are still finalizing the design and materials of the enclosure, which affects transmission strength.
We have purposely designed the firmware to try and minimize power burn through BLE, but it may be possible to increase transmission range if we sacrifice battery life / operating time. I can see another type of possible solution in which Victoria is wearing a thin iPod touch strapped on in some manner. An app running on that could stream data via WiFi to your Mac, enabling a much larger possible performance space. The major downside is having to wear an iPod touch on your body.
You can have unlimited numbers of sensors if it is a computer for example and this would depend on the software. The average is 8. Something to consider, even at this early stage, is how you can use different numbers of sensors in different positions to be able to do different things. One thing that strikes me is that you have the potential for information coming from up to ten sensors simultaneously, each of which will can transmit muscle data. We can keep that in mind when putting together a framework to accept the data, in particular if what we want to do is recognize gestures, movements, and combinations of movements.
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Reflection on Q&A’s
After these initial technical questions it highlighted the criticality of this technical collaboration. The conversations also demonstrated how a collaboration can take place between York, UK and California, USA through online forums.
