Love Cassette
Installation that Turns Your Love Message Into A Sound-Wave Postcard
We all have friends, families or lovers that we hold dear, but few of us feel comfortable telling them how much we care.
Especially for some, a chance to help express their love is all they need. Love cassette is such an interactive installation that is intended to
add sweetness into our life. It can hear one's love message, and turn it into a postcard on the spot.
Work at 造物 | 2015-2016 My Role: Lead Designer & Engineer Teammates: Graphic Designers, HTML5 programmer Skills: design + fabrication + integrative innovation
Interaction Details
1. When user walks up toward the cassette, the bulb circle near his/her side lights up as a form of greeting.
2. User stands in front of one bulb circle, puts on the headset, and presses the "record" button.
3. Upon release, the bulb shines in turn and the disk rotates, while user has 5 seconds to record the love message through microphone.
4. Once finished, the recorded message will be played once more through the headset for user to decide whether another try is needed.
5. Then user waits for 15 seconds and receives a unique postcard from the exit below, which has the recorded soundwave printed on it, and a QR code on the stamp zone.
6. Scan that QR code with a cellphone, user will be led to an HTML5 page where the love message can be played and shared.
7. ( We encourage user to give that postcard as a gift to their beloved ones for second-round distribution.)
8. (We also provide round copper pieces sized 1-10 so that users can DIY unique love-message necklaces based on their soundwave pattern.)
Business Loop
As online shopping grows, brick and mortar stores have to come up with new features to attract consumers.
Love Cassette is an answer to that. The whole experience constructs a closed-loop business system of both online and offline marketing.
Not only can it attract customers and heat up social media, Love Cassette itself generates revenue by selling unique sound-wave necklaces.
We proved our hypothesis that customers have a higher tendency to purchase customized items relating to
a personal interactive experience they invested emotion and time in.
Love cassette first appeared at a six-month long pop-up store "Be Together" in Shanghai, and soon became viral.
From December 19, 2015 to June 26, 2016, over 130,000 customers participated and nearly 14,000 sound wave necklaces were sold.
Since its initial success, Love Cassette has traveled to 6 sites (including art museums, shopping malls, exhibitions, creative markets, etc.)
in 3 cities. In total, more than 480,000 love messages have been collected and turned into sound wave postcards, accordingly,
over 56,000 sound wave necklaces have been sold.
Design Process
Love Cassette has gone thorough 3 iterations and has one sister installation. The process is demonstrated as below.
Ideation
Initially, the project was part of an exhibition themed "Love Is to Be Together",
where I was asked to invent an installation that could encourage people to express their love.
I brainstormed over 10 ideas, and chose five of the most promising ones, including a whisper-hearing tree, a sky of secret-bearing stars, a screen with flowers on it that would blossom as people talk to them, a forest of hearts that are eager to share their feelings,
and a cassette through which people could record their love messages.
Love cassette was selected as the final choice for its buzz-worthiness in terms of its look and consistency with the style of other exhibits.
Appearance Design
The unnecessary parts of a cassette were removed while the features were kept and strengthened by LED light bulbs and neon.
As for dimensioning, field size (maximum height: 3500 mm length: 3000 mm) as well as human scale were taken into consideration.
Technical Solution
Remember the interaction steps stated above? That's all the functions and effects we needed to enable.
In the first version, I divided them into two relatively separate parts.
The rotating disk and shining bulb effect while user is recording a love message was achieved by mechanical structure and electrics.
While all the functions related to the voice message (5-second recording upon button release, voice visualization, image processing, automatic postcard printing, voice data uploading onto Cloud Server, HTML5 page generating) were accomplished by Java + Processing programming.
For circuit design, safety comes first. All the parts exposed to human interaction must operate under low voltage.
So I chose 12V 2W LED light bulbs, and 12V electric relays and switches.
Though the shining effect controller available was supposed to exert 220V, I did a bit refitting to reduce output.
For sound visualization, I was suggested by my friend Bai Kai to use Minim, a user-friendly audio library in Processing.
Another challenge is to connect the program with external switch input.
I found the ready-made switch input board online, which is able to send reliable signal to the computer program when the switch is pressed.
The java program (including some Processing) does the following things:
1. play a "Ding" Sound that alerts user to start recording, record, and generate a unique serial number as well as a QR code link
2. replay the recorded file, analyze it and get the corresponding sound-wave image from it
3. produce a postcard according to the pre-set layout, the QR code in 1, and the sound-wave image in 2, upload the parameters and files required for HTML5 onto the server
4. communicate with the printer to print out the unique postcard produced in 3
In the second version, thanks to the help of our electrical engineer Tony Zhu, arduino was introduced to simplify the electric part.
He used arduino uno programming as well as the 8-way relay to replace the bulky light controller so the whole system could be slimmer.
Periphery Design
Graphic designer Jonney Wen and Xue Bi designed the postcard layout, packaging, posters, flyers, as well as the HTML5 page effects
based on my wireframe sketch. The visual style had to be adjusted each time to suit specific exhibition themes. But "love", "cassette" as well as "sound-wave" are the common threads.
System Integration
During the test, we found out most errors come from the printer. When running out of ink, or overheated, the printer would stop working.
To solve that, we installed remote desktop control to collect warnings, which enabled us to click on a cellphone to restart the printer.
We also faced a lot of instability issues with wifi or wired networks provided by our collaborators.
Thus we equipped the system with wireless network cards as a backup plan.
Finally, as love cassette were expected to travel to other cities, it had to withstand long-distance transportation.
The electrical parts and wires needed to be sorted and encased.
The goal was to make the system immune to "physical attacks", while still open for inspection and debugging.
Love Stories
As stated in the beginning, Love Cassette was meant to create a comfortable place for people to express their love.
Magically, it accomplished this mission!
Those moments when moms tell their kids, girls tell their boyfriends, teenagers wish their buddies, and even people at their nineties
impart to their children, how deep their love is leave a mark in everyone’s heart.
We have built an installation that connects people and creates wonderful memories.
I am proud of that, and deeply grateful for the dedication of our team & collaborators.
(Spoiler alert: The very first sound-wave postcard now sits on my desk, watching over the lovely city of Boston.)
