Grounded by the concept of calm technology and minimalism, we decided on using sphere as the form factor and keep the user interaction simple and intuitive. To minimize users’ overwhelming experience given the fact that many people have multiple screens or devices, this IoT device emphasizes on making the user flow more automatic.

Users who work from home are encouraged to interact with their colleagues by sending positive notes to each other. In a scenario where user A wants to send kudos to user B, A will first select user B on the screen and insert his hand-written note into Bravo. Scanning and sending will then follow automatically. User B will have the note from A automatically printed, and interaction among the team will be visualized on the display screen in real time.

Frontend & Backend UX Design & Dev
The frontend user interface displayed on the touch screen enables Bravo’s functionalities including notes capturing, sending, receiving, and printing. Most importantly, it serves as a shared space for team members to gather together virtually — a fun, engaging virtual office! Once the mobile app onboarding process is completed, team members added on the mobile app will appear on the display screen, and Bravo is ready to go. Technology used are MQTT, WebSocket, p5.js, and javascript.

Stage 1 - Default: Team members move freely on the screen when there is no interaction among colleagues. Members collide when bumping into each other in the “virtual office.”

Stage 2 - Reach Out: When user A wants to send a kudo to user B, A clicks on B’s avatar and a popup window appears for A to make a decision. After choosing “Yes,” A can scan the note he/she writes for B, which will then be sent to B and printed automatically.

Stage 3 - Remote Interaction Complete: When B successfully receives the printed note from A, A and B will be attracted to each other and bounce back and forth on the frontend UI, indicating one successful remote interaction. This real-time visualization of a team-scale interaction will be shared on all devices among the team.

Physical Computing
Image processing: this step is necessary for Adafruit Thermal Printer to print the note successfully. Since the printer only recognizes gray-scale bitmap image type, it’s essential to modify the initial image that the camera captures. During our testing, we recognized that the printer performs the best when the image only contains high contrast black and white, with a bright lighting environment. PIL image process with threshold level adjustment is the main tool we used to get the best image result.

Hi-fi prototyping: models we designed in Fusion 360 were 3D printed and were applied primer and spray paint for high-fidelity prototyping.To smoothen the surface, we sanded the printed model at 120-220 degree to reduce scratches or bumps on the surface to the bare minimum. We then sprayed a layer of primer, waited for 2-3 hours to dry, and continued sanding the primer surface at 220-300 degree. Lastly, we carefully sprayed the surface with white spray paint and let it dry for about 7 hours.
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Assembly: we used splicing, glue gun, super glue, and tapes to attach all the printed parts during the assembly process. If we have more time, we would have designed more splicing parts for the internal structure of the model to increase the efficiency of our assembly process.