The Orange Juice Squeezer-Squeeze Orange experience design
No real orange and squeezer in the room but make you feel, smell, and want a cup of orange juice.
Couse
Physical computing and Introduction to Computation Media
Challenge
How to create an atmosphere that makes people have a feeling of the situation I set without using the real thing. The sense will lead by smell. Will the smell work well for that?
Outcome
A physical squeezer could do the same action of squeeze and come out with smell and visual and sound within an associate environment.
Duration
October 2019 - December 2019
Role of me
Designer, maker, programmer
Tools
Arduino UNO, humidifier sensor, acrylic sheets, laser-cut, P5.Js web editor. Orange smell essential oil.
Overview
Research
The smell is a very important sense of human begins. It is unique, it will remind us what is that smell, what story that related to us? And we will immediately do the reaction of do we like that or not? It connects to our memory and emotion. When smells are happending associated with the behavior, visual, and sound, it could create the whole story.
Picture source from:
https://www.fifthsense.org.uk/psychology-and-smell/
Idea & Inspiration
Inspiration
The idea of the orange juice squeezer was inspired by the light in the ITP hallway from a previous ITP student. He projected the action of a hand to turn on and off the light to make people feel it has a real switch that can control the light.
The light in the ITP hallway reminds me of the experience when I was studying film in undergrad. Bring the audience into the scene is a sentence I always heard when I was studying film. Sometimes when we need to create an atmosphere that relates the script, we need to use the production design, camera angle, and editing. Sometimes in the film industry, we will need to create something has not existed to become real by using those tools. Because of the creation of these atmospheres, it gives people the impression of something that does not exist. But these things are not necessarily like this. What if to create a feeling for something that already exists in a different sensory way, will it change people's original view?
Ideation
I pop up with the idea when I was cutting an orange, and the juice splashed on my face, the smell makes me feel like I had drunk a cup of orange juice. Orange juice is a common juice in people’s daily life. The direct sense way to feel a cup of orange juice is to drink it. What if you could only see, hear, and smell it. Will you feel like you are having a cup of orange juice? It is very ironic and it shows that there are many things in life that integrate many sensory feelings, not just those most direct feelings. It also shows the diversity of everything in the world.
Sketch of how it works
I imagined the orange juice squeezer is in a normal juice squeezer shape. When people get a fake orange and squeeze it on the squeezer, the machine will release orange smell, and the projector will project the animation of a cup of orange fill up with sound effects.
Making Progress
Due to I was the first time to hand on designing, programming, and making the installations. I met a lot of troubles. It all makes me learned a lot of experience. Doing is not like thinking, it will have a lot of problems happen.
Problem 1:
To make the smell released I have to use a humidifier sensor connect to Arduino and make it control by the Arduino. But the sensor seems cannot connect to the Arduino. It needs another circuit board to drive the humidifier.
Solution:
I brought a new hunidifier sensor that has a switch connect on it.
Problem 2 and solution:
It works fine on itself, but it cannot control by Arduino still. So I add a relay for it to make the switch control by the relay.
I made a prototype box with the first idea I have. I put the humidifier sensor into a cup of water with essential oil. It was working well.
Problem 3&4:
Then I had the biggest problem since I made this project: The humidifier sensor was destroyed by the oil. And after the first user test, many people feel the distance sensor is hard to detected hand and it is not making sensor on not touching the sensor and it trigger the humidifier.
Solutions：
I changed the switch to bottom, redesign and recode the whole installation. For the humidifier sensor, I found the oil cannot touch the front part of the sensor, or it will destroy the wires. I thought about using a tube to containt the liquid.
Fabrication:
Here is the fabrication for the body of the squeezer and the inside view.
Final Outcome
User Test
I got a chance to show my work on the ITP Winter Show 2019. Which gives me a very good opportunity to do the user test.
For the winter show, I created my smell in a closed environment. And I found these are the reaction of people can make me do some improvement.
When I close the door, people thought my project is not working and they just take a look outside the room and decided not to come in. Especially they saw may squeezer is not sewed and they can see the inside construction. It makes me know that I have to make my interface as clean as I can to make the user feel it is a working machine.
Second, I took a video of the users came in and try my machine. Some of the comments and reactions make me learn a lot. There is a guy who asked me to map the coding and make the juice stop at the point when people released their hand, it will make the squeezer more reality. There are some people expect more than just the smell to come out and they expect something funny or horror happened. And there are some people said my product is suitable for children, it is more like a toy. There are all very good comments although it is not what I want to create.
I think it is a good chance to test the project I made. To know what it makes people feel and how can I improve my idea and the methods to express it.
