Interfacing options - Ste Shine

I've been working on the interfacing for our project and the patch is working successfully and today me and Ben managed to allow our laptops to communicate with each other via an Ethernet cable and the MXJ object in Max.
However in terms of the physical interaction there has been a few issues which i am currently trying to resolve. We initially intended to use an old computer keyboard and large push button lamps to activate various video and audio files in max, however i'm having trouble getting the keyboard to communicate with my computer and have started working an alternative max patch which uses the Leamer as it's interfacing device. I intend to try and get the keyboard working but am using the Leamer as an alternative as time is a factor.

Project Outline - Ben Johnson

Ben: For Brain Awareness week our project has been designed to 'promote the brain' and to give children, specifically early secondary school children (age 10-14), an introduction into what certain parts of the brain control. 

The brain will be divided up into 5 categories, each of which will be explored with the press of certain buttons. The five categories are as follows:

Movement - Frontal

Hearing - Temporal

Speech - Frontal/Temporal

Visual - Occipital

General Sensory - Parietal

The design of the installation will be as follows, diagram to come later:

At the entrance of the space is a podium, around waist height. On top of this podium is a model of the brain. On this brain, the 4 different lobes of the Cerebrum are coloured differently. (Frontal: Blue, Parietal: Red, Temporal: Green, Occipital: Yellow)

Behind the podium are objects that appeared to be scattered on the floor. As each object is picked up/pressed, various videos and sound files are loaded and played. 

Surrounding the objects and the podium are walls covering 3 sides, onto each of these will be a projection. The projection at the front will show the educational film explaining how that area of the brain works, and the side walls will show a short film relating to the object that was pressed. Example: for a video explaining about memory, the object could be a set of polaroids, and the side videos could show a home movie. All videos to be projected onto the side walls will be downloaded from the internet, with permission documents from the owner.

As there are only two people working on this project instead of three, tasks will be split as follows:

Scripting - Ben

Composition of sound - Ste

Interfacing - Ste

A/V Design - Ben

Space Design - Ste

Triggering - Ben

GUI - Ste

Further posts will be made regarding each of the separate elements.