Here at My Home 2.0, we like to make dreams come true for the families, and sometimes this leads to us Guru's creating some interesting devices and systems. Individually, the Guru's have created projects that some of you thought were interesting, phenomenal, or just plain unimaginable. However all of our projects to date have been solo or two-man team projects.

So the burning question of the hour is what happens when you combine FiOS with the copacetic craftsmanship of Brian, the eclectic enumeration of Lloyd, and the poetic passion of Alison Lewis?

Prepare to be "fed" a delectable meal of ingenuity, design, and engineering...

What is FeED?

FeED, or FiOS-enabled Emotion Detection, is a System created to give online gamers an advantage by giving them a heads-up display of their opponent's mood. I will attempt to give you an overview of the System in this Post, but each individual component will need its own individual detailed explination. The Porter Family in Fort, Wayne, Indiana received the first implementation of the system in their living room. Check the system layout after the break.

The FeED System consists of 6 primary components:

• XBOX 360 Headset Modification (Hack)
• FiOS Custom Home Integration
• Convertible Coffee Table
• Color Lighting System
• Home Theater PC
  
• Emotion Detection Software

I will attempt to give an overview of each of these components, and how they work together to create the FeED System.

FiOS Custom Home Integration

Let's begin with the FiOS Custom Home Integration. For those of you out there with FiOS you may be aware of this service provided by the FiOS Pros. For those of you who don't have FiOS or don't know what I am talking about, allow me to explain.

In addition to hooking you up with the fastest connection on the block, the FiOS Pro's can run a FiOS TV, Internet, or Phone line anywhere in the house! This is the key piece that makes our projects come to life; for instance if some family member wants to be able to do video chatting with their pen pal while they are in the basement closet, our FiOS Pro's will run an ethernet connection to that closet to ensure a reliable connection while chatting and surfing the web.

Now for the Porter Family, we did not need anything as wild as a dungeon video chat station, but we did need our coffee table to be connected to the Home Network.

So I asked Steve, our resident FiOS Pro, to run a line from the router in the Home Office to the Convertible Coffee Table. He happily obliged, and had a port installed before I knew it. In addition to having an internet line at the coffee table, I also needed one at the Theatre Cabinet for the XBOX, Home Theater PC, and the Controller System. He hooked it up, and had a high speed ethernet switch setup in no time.

Now that we have our Home Network Lines in Place, we can connect all the pieces together!

XBOX 360 Headset Hack

The goal of our project is to create a heads-up of our gaming opponents' mood. Well our opponent could be in the next room, or in Uzbekistan, so we need a way of deducting some emotional information about the person. Often times you chat with your opponent while playing. You can usually get an idea of your opponent's mood by listening to them. Our goal is to take it a step further and really let the gamer know how the opponents are feeling.

We will need to teach our computer how to understand mood via analysis of our opponents audio feed; but first we need to get that audio feed to the computer.

Your opponent's audio feed is sent from the internet to your game controller, and you can hear them when you plug your headset into the controller. We are going to tap into that audio feed and split it so that we get our opponents feed on the computer. I will not go into the full details of the Hack (DIY coming soon), but you can get an idea of what we are doing from the images below.

Now that we have our opponent's audio, we need to get it from the gamer sitting on the couch, to the Home Theatre PC. This is where our Convertible Coffee Table comes in hand!

Convertible Coffee Table

The Convertible Coffee table is a Brian Albert and Lloyd Emelle one-of-a-kind piece. We set a lot of requirements for ourselves on this project so we needed to create something that could be both functional and still look good in the house. The amazing carpentry work and ingenuity of Mr. Albert gave birth to the Convertible Coffee Table. Since the gamer will be sitting at the couch playing the game, our audio feed hack needs to get to the PC in the Theater cabinet without running miles of audio cable. So, we installed a Belkin Networked USB Hub inside of the Coffee table. The USB Hub allows us to connect almost any USB device to our PC via the FiOS Home Network. With the FiOS line ready from Steve, we connected our Hub to the Home Network and can now install USB devices in our Coffee Table. The next thing we installed was a USB sound card. We also installed ports on the skirt of the table for our headset hack.

Now, you may be wondering why we are calling this table a "Convertible Coffee Table". Good Question. The coffee table is a dark wood piece and matches with the decor of the room. But at the flip of a switch, the Coffee Table is transformed into a Mini Interactive Home Entertainment Experience. A 20 inch HDTV/Monitor pops out of the table and gives the gamer or whomever a second screen. This screen has all of the same inputs as the main screen (i.e. FiOS TV, Home Theater PC, XBOX, etc). I will let Brian explain the table in more detail. ;)

Ok! (Sigh...)

That's a mouth full....I need to take a break.

Next Article I will explain the Color Light System, Home Theatre PC, and Emotion Detection Software.

Posted by Guru Lloyd | tagged: Table, Coffee, Convertible, FeED, Lloyd, Brian