Pygmies by Pors and Rao (2006-09)

In this playful piece Rao and Pors create a multitude of personified little creatures. The creature live around the peripheries of the frame. Then pop out when they sense that the environment is safe.

http://www.ted.com/talks/aparna_rao_high_tech_art_with_a_sense_of_humor.html

This piece creates a system of little creatures that are extremely simple in form, but are animated in their movement and interaction with their environment. They retreat whenever they are faced with noise, but they ignore background noise. I think this installation succeed in creating an environment for play, but I might have been more compelling from a formal stand-point.

Scratch and Tickle by George Roland (1996)

In Scratch you are faced with an image of a woman’s back and a voice requesting for you to scratch it with your mouse. She then instructs on how she would like to be scratched, but as time goes on she becomes increasingly insistant and abusive.

SFCI Archive: SCRATCH and TICKLE (1996) from STUDIO for Creative Inquiry on Vimeo.

This is a classic piece, where a very simple interaction is used as a framework to create a relationship and tell a story. I think it is a good example of how the simplest interaction, like a mouse click and drag can create a very compelling piece. I think it is also successful because it requires minimum effort on the part of the user, most of the piece happens in the application itself.

 Street View Stereographic by Ryan Alexander 

Alexander uses the google APIs to manipulate street view into a stereographic or circular view.

This isn’t really an art piece, as presented here, I am more interested in it because I want to learn more about how he coded it. (All his code is on git!!) It is an interesting visual effect. It creates quite a humorous form. I wish they could be globes I could circle around.

#Google Glass

Google Glass is a glass which extends human sensation. It is integrated Internet service and as many sensors into the small devices. It will be the first time possible to make strong augment reality possible for normal people in large scale.

#Johnny Cash Project

Again this is the most impressive crowdsourcing art project for purpose of memorizing Johnny Cash. The project divide each frame of the song Ain’t no Grave and present them on the Internet. Anyone who is interested in the certain frame can reedit it by all means. The MV is finally re-generated by people all over the world.

The Johnny Cash Project from Chris Milk on Vimeo.

#Bicycle Built for Two Thousand by Aaron Koblin

Bicycle Built For 2,000 is comprised of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard.

#Swarm Robots

Swarm Robots is a swarm of robots which individually has lower ability but collectively can achieve things which powerful robots cannot do with coordination. This is interesting since it provides us different view of intelligence.

Greetings, fellows. I offer as intellectual tribute the following code-based works that incorporate interactivity in various ways.

Work number one is from our very own James George along with Chris Milk and Ben Tricklebank, titled The Treachery of Sanctuary. Essentially, the work displays your shadow on one of three white monolithic screens. The work follows a bird motif – depending on the screen, your silhouette may grow wings, may be devoured by birds, or may dissipate into a flock of them. This installation is an interesting convergence of various technologies – Kinect data gleaned through OpenFrameworks is funneled into Unity. The interaction that occurs is passive – your body is simply the canvas on which the work is produced.

Link: http://jamesgeorge.org/works/treachery.html

Work two is from Kyle McDonald. This interactive piece asks for a certain amount of trust from the user. While you keep your eyes closed and hold a pen, the moving platform on which you have placed your hand moves, resulting in a self-portrait created using computer vision software. It’s a blind portrait you would never be capable of drawing, a result of probably the most direct collaboration with a machine I have ever seen.

More here: http://thecreatorsproject.com/blog/you-can-finally-be-an-artist-with-this-self-portrait-machine

In my research of figures we haven’t discussed much in class (and talking to Golan), I discovered that Intel has its own research division that delves into creative coding. `As part of a live event, Doug Carmean and his team created an interactive work in collaboration with Social Print Studio. It took a real-time stream of instagram photos taken during the event and allowed visitors to sift through them using a Kinect. Not anything particularly revolutionary, but I like the impermanence of the whole thing – it can only exist for the event, and it seems to use that to its advantage.

Link: http://thecreatorsproject.com/blog/artists-and-engineers-create-the-future-of-art-and-technology

Acoustic Barcodes // HCII CMU

Straight out of Carnegie Mellon, an interesting interaction using structured patterns of physical notches as Acoustic Barcodes. Swiping the barcodes with for example a fingernail produce a complex sound that can be resolved to a binary ID. A single, inexpensive contact microphone attached to a surface or object is used to capture the waveform. While the applications might be a bit odd, I think it’s an very interesting approach by making the interaction more tangible compared to scanning an RFID.
 

Heat Map // onformative

A translation between sight and touch merges human sensing abilities. Projecting imaginary heat on top of human skin and its surrounding to create a virtual thermo reactive surface. I think this is an interesting concept of giving the illusion and perception of heat on a surface, because we are so used to the visual representation of thermo colors for temperature. The smudge effect really reenforces the illusion of heat being transferred on a surface and the heat dissipates over time. I would love to test and interact with the system for myself and see how it would play tricks on my senses.
 

Zimoun: Sound Sculptures & Installations, Sound Architectrues

Using simple and functional components, Zimoun builds architecturally-minded platforms of sound. Exploring mechanical rhythm and flow in prepared systems, his installations incorporate commonplace industrial objects. In an obsessive display of simple and functional materials, these works articulate a tension between the orderly patterns of Modernism and the chaotic forces of life. I love the simplicity of the work, and how rich and mesmerizing the experience is. It’s just something stuck onto a servo, but the compositions and sounds that the sculptures create have a very elegant feeling to it.

Chamelon Guitar (by MIT Media Lab)

It’s a 99-in-one guitar. It has different small bodies, equipped with piezo sensors. They can get the resonance of the small body, and simulate that for the whole. I think this is a really simple, and pure idea, that is relatively easily implemented.

CATEN (David Letellier)

Created for the Saint Sauveur chapel in Caen, Caten is a levitating sculpture, determined by gravity and guiding the evolution of a sound composition.
300 wires suspended from two ropes, connected themselves at each end to a slowly rotating arm, form an evanescent surface which interacts with the architecture.

At each turn, the engines emit one of the first 4 notes of the scale (Ut, Re, Mi, Fa), creating a sequence of intervals, constantly reconfigured. Low frequencies resonate in the space and emphazise the transcendental character of a place once dedicated to faith.
The name is derived from the term catenary, which describes the plane curve formed by a rope hanging between two points.

Konkreet Performer

Konkreet Performer is a live music performance controller. It has a beautiful circular multi-touch interface that reconnects the musician’s actions directly with the music. Although their description sounds a bit too commercial, I think this is a good example of what’s possible to do with multi-touch devices.

Number 1: Obligatory Music Post.

I thought this project (and the other hundreds of similar projects with apps and music) is pretty cool. This wave of software designers is trying to find new intuitive ways to perceive, process, and manipulate music, and this is just one example which looks particularly pretty. That said, I think that coming off a project like my last one where I felt underwhelmed with my results, I think I want to leave music behind for this project. Which brings me to:

Number 2: Wii Remote Finger Tracking

I love Johnny Lee. I think we can all learn from his top notch documentation skills, plus he is very creative with inexpensive resources. While the Wii Remote Finger tracking is not an interactive art piece in its own right, I think I could easily set this up and use it as a resource for my interactive projects, which is why I am showing it here.

And number 3: Non-real-time interaction

Baroque.me: J.S. Bach – Cello Suite No. 1 – Prelude from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.

It’s a visualization. But it’s also a piece of non-real-time interactive art. The lengths of the strings interact with the pitches in the signal, and the result is a really pretty experience. Maybe without abandoning music altogether I can still make a meaningful piece in the space of my two disciplines, without putting the pressure of composition upon myself (because I am just really really insecure in my ability to compose meaningful music, by hand or algorithmically)

{ PURE WHITE PAPER – LI HONGBO }

Simple, elegant, analogue interaction.  I was amazed by the fact that morphing of the structures was actually thousands of papers.

Inspiring:

a. Using analogue materials to mimic digitalization process;

b. Even the most common and ordinary material can make extraordinaries. – do we really need high technology?

c. This could be seen as a reverse and dynamic version of 3D printing.

{ L.S.D+LIGHT SEQUENCER – Benjamin Gaulon}

Using light-dependent resistor to receive the brightness of the screen as input to control the sound wave parameters.

A few things that worth thinking:

a. this might not be as interesting if is not done with analogue;

b. sound-visual connection isn’t clear enough;

c. the ultimate question for sonification: how to make the sound appreciable and beautiful and less randomness sounding.

{Voice Array – Rafeal Lozano-Hemme}

Poetic. I love it that the waveform is not always there, but you could see and hear it grow along timeline.

Light and space is immersive, but I wonder how the sound space was set-up, surround would definitely be a plus.

When I was doing this looking outwards, I am kind of naturally re-define interactivity in my mind. I consider from large dimension of interactivity to the tiny fine interactive experience. I also think about the necessity of this interactivity and human senses.
The examples as follows are focused on the topics above.

Driveless Car – Interact or Not
One day in the near future, we will not driving and the car will drive us to where we want. I am thinking two things: one is whether or not people will miss the lost feeling of driving a vehicle; another is that people will do on there driveless cars. With the coming of driveless car, people’s interaction with car will all change. People may do the work, hangout on g+, or set around drinks coffee.
In this sense, some missing interaction may be a good thing; while I am sure, this field interactivity is to be defined.

XL vs XS
WHITE NOISE WHITE LIGHT
http://www.mystudio.us/projects/3
Soft Robot Walking and Crawling
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DsbS9cMOAE

The first hologram example is not extremely big, but my point is to put interactivity on an urban level. Mash up element in the living world and make something tangible is the most accessable way for people to interacte with. From this example I come up with the thought that the straight-forward playfulness is the core of tangible interaction.

Another example is the creep soft robot. people are not touching it, but people controls it. Sometime people may not controls it, and it will go on its own way. From this example i understand dimension/material/behavior contribute to interactivity.

Human Senses
It seems that we have over use our virtual senses with the advantage of screen displays. With apple’s extraordinary iphone and ipad, interaction and intelligence is greatly enabled in artifacts. However, interaction overwhelmingly based on single senese is not intuitive. I therefore list human senses as my third topic. I am very optimistic about next generation’s interaction maybe somethign we now called TUI- tangible user interface.

exTouch from Tangible Media Group on Vimeo.

Durrell Bishop Marble Answer Machine

I choose this one because it is a very beginning of TUI. It’s a really new interaction way for people to interact with virtual things.

1992 Marble Answer Machine. The physical visualisation of a system. This was the second of many demonstrations that simplified the interaction of products. It uses the direct manipulation of messages within the descriptive environment of a product and then the extension of this language to other products.

Here’s the video.

T(ether)

It’s a new way to combine the virtual world and real world. T(ether) is a novel spatially aware display that supports intuitive interaction with volumetric data. The display acts as a window affording users a perspective view of three- dimensional data through tracking of head position and orientation. T(ether) creates a 1:1 mapping between real and virtual coordinate space allowing immersive exploration of the joint domain. Our system creates a shared workspace in which co-located or remote users can collaborate in both the real and virtual worlds. The system allows input through capacitive touch on the display and a motion-tracked glove. When placed behind the display, the user’s hand extends into the virtual world, enabling the user to interact with objects directly.

Omnitouch

Today’s mobile computers provide omnipresent access to information, creation and communication facilities. It is undeniable that they have forever changed the way we work, play and interact. However, mobile interaction is far from solved. Diminutive screens and buttons mar the user experience, and otherwise prevent us from realizing their full potential.

It’s a powerful alternative approach to mobile interaction that uses a body-worn projection/sensing system to capitalize on the tremendous surface area the real world provides.  However, turning everyday surfaces into interactive platforms requires sophisticated hardware and sensing. Further, to be truly mobile, systems must either fit in the pocket or be wearable.