Daily Archives: 01 Apr 2013

Keqin

01 Apr 2013

I just found that current cv or kinect system cannot give user real feeling or real feedback.

So I think I want to make some real thing that can give some feedback to users when they

interact with the cv or kinect system.

This is a robot hand controlled by a kind of material called SMA wires. I think I will use something like this to give people feedback on their hand.

 

And one more project about this.

And this is one haptic way to give feedback to user when they interact with the cv or kinect system.

Meng

01 Apr 2013

Capstone Brief
I want to design a 3D tangible display for map data visualization usage.

See Through 3D Desktop
by Jinha Lee MSR

Trans of Data
by MIT Sensible City Lab
http://senseable.mit.edu/trainsofdata/

Geographical Visualization: Where America Lives
by Feilding Cage
http://www.time.com/time/interactive/0,31813,1549966,00.htmlScreen Shot 2013-04-01 at 6.02.25 PM

Nathan

01 Apr 2013

I am aiming to build a ‘throwing’ machine that will proceded to launch light bulbs at a wall and/or me. If you have seen my main body of work you will understand that I am talking about apprehension, gentleness, aggressiveness, and semi-uncontrollable circumstances. I have been skimming the web for designs of machines that inspire the design and application of my own machine.

I’m looking for a machine that has a sense of ‘crude’ making and a machine that has a ‘fluid’ action.
I’m looking to build a machine that talks about more than the sum of its parts and actions.
I’m looking to do a performance with or a video of this machine working.
I’m looking to put this in my upcoming show as a physical installation with accompanying video.

Oscar Peters

So KANNO yang02

SENSELESS DRAWING BOT #2 from yang02 on Vimeo.

Robb

01 Apr 2013

Joshua Lopez-Binder and I plan on making some gorgeous and outrageously efficient heat sinks.
What is a heatsink, you may ask? A heat sink is an object, typically metal, that is designed to absorb and dissipate heat. They are primarily used to cool hot electrical components.

My vested interest in making a super efficient and highly beautiful heatsink is quite related to my continued, yet slow pursuit of making a new Cryoscope. I find its current design noisy(due to fan) and a little static aesthetically. The device needs a large heatsink in order for the solid state heat pump(Pelter Element) to refrigerate the contact surface.
The applications of such a component are not at all limited to my old project.
If I can get it to provoke imagery of a lightening storm, I think it would be pretty neat.
Josh and I have some theories. We think that naturally inspired fractal geometries will make very nice heat dumpsters indeed.

I am thrown with licthenberg figures, the pattern left behing by high intensity electrical charges. Here is an example of one on the back of a human who survived a lightening strike.722px-Tesla-coil-discharge
This looks like it will shape up to be the most formal thing I have pursued since enrolling in art school. I feel that the physical manifestation of thermal radiation of waste is an important aspect of my earlier thermal work. I had tried in the earliest Cryoscope to hide the byproduct heat using aesthetics that were too close to Apple for my comfort.

Lichtenberg ‘Art’

A group of scientists, dubbing themselves Lightening Whisperers, started a company which embeds Lichtenberg figures in acrylic (Plexiglass) blocks using a multi-million volt electron beam and a hammer and nail. The website is a great way to kill an hour looking at these beautiful little desk toys. They also shrink coins.

Josh Outlined some very nice works by Nervous System. They make very pretty generative jewelry, among other things. I just spent an hour scrolling on their blog. I always look too far outwards and end up with a post that is too short.

Lichtenberg Figure in Processing!

Alan

01 Apr 2013

###Hydrophobic Material As Art? 

I got the inspiration from this TED talk that we may use any material to make artwork. This can be extended to hydrophobic material, fire, water, electricity, magnetics, etc.

 

###basil.js – Computational and generative design using Adobe InDesign

basil.js is a scripting library that has been developed at the Visual Communication Institute at The Basel School of Design during the last nine months and is now made public as open-source. Based on the principles of “Processing”, basil.js allows designers and artists to individually expand the possibilities of Adobe InDesign in order to create complex projects in data visualization and generative design.

This inspired me since I may generate art around certain texts and images. However, the art is limited by Adobe software, and I may expand it to browser based application which is much more scalable.

###Turn Your Favorite Website Into A Playable 3D Maze With World Wide Maze

A rad new game from Google Chrome Experiments synchs up your computer’s Chrome browser with your smartphone to create a multi-platform coordinated 3D maze. The game, called World Wide Maze, turns any website into a playable game where you navigate a ball around a series of courses.

Browser interactions are always my favored projects. Disecting websites into pieces and reframing them is a nice idea. However, the game itself is still lame. There is still a chance to raise the game flow and whole design features.

### PM2.5 in China – Data Visualization

A tech team in China opened PM2.5 api to public in China for the first time. I may generate the first visualization art about PM 2.5 data in China.

Looking outwards – Final Project

1. A new AR platform is desperately needed.

So I will likely be using Vuforia – Qualcomm’s AR platform. After talking with the lead developer at BigPlayAR, it seems like Vuforia is the clear winner, allowing me to work in Unity or in their own environment.

2. I will also be wrapping up some loose ends with the Processing implementation.

community

As Golan helped me discover, getting RGBD to work in Processing is a project that the community is just now tackling, so I likely will be forking this guy’s repo and pull requesting to create one dynamite implementation!

3. INSPIRATION

Geography-specific AR:

AR at MOMA:

AR Card Game:
This video autoplays so I made a link to it instead

Whimsical augmentation of a physical space:

Reinterpreting architecture from the perspective of the fantastic:

Another geo-augmentation

Marlena

01 Apr 2013

It’s become clear to me that I should spend some time thinking about making art concerning a topic that, due to recent events, has been haunting my mind for several months now: suicide. A friend of mine took his life a few months ago and I have a close family member who has inflicted self-harm and made threats of this nature. I have been pushing it aside for a long time and now would be a good opportunity to figure out exactly what I’m feeling and come to terms with it. I’ll do more research on past works soon–first I need to do some thinking of my own.

Elwin

01 Apr 2013

I’ve decided to take my “shy mirror” idea from project 3 to the next level for my capstone project. The comments that I received from fellow students really helped me to think a bit deeper about the concept and how far I could take this.

Development & Improvements

– Embed the camera behind the mirror in the center. This way the camera’s viewing angle will always rotate with the mirror and wouldn’t be restricted compared to a fixed camera with a fixed viewing angle like in my current design. Golan mentioned this in the comments and I had this idea earlier before, but the idea kind of got lost during the building process. This time I would definitely want to try out this method and probably purchase some acrylic mirror from Acrylite-Shop instead of the mirror I bought from RiteAid.

– Golan also mentioned using the standard OpenCV face tracker. I wasn’t aware that the standard library had a face tracking option. This is definitely something I will try out, since the ofxFaceTracker was lagging for some reason.

– Trajectory planning for smoother movement. At the moment I’m just sending out a rotational angle to the servo, hence the quick motion to a specific location.

– I always had the idea that this would be a wall piece. I think for the capstone project, I would be able to pull it off if I plan it in advance and arrange a space and materials to actually construct a wall for it. Also, the current mount is pretty ghetto and built last minute. For the capstone version, I would try to hide the electronics and spend more time creating and polishing a casing for the piece.

Personality

This would be the major attraction. Apart from further developing the points above, I’ve received a lot of feedback about creating more personality for the mirror. I think this is a very interesting idea and something I would like to pursue of the capstone version.

In the realm of the “shy mirror”, I could create and showcase several personalities based on motion, speed and timing. For example:
– Slow and smooth motion to create a shy and innocent character
– Quicker and smooth motion for scared (?)
– Quick and jerky to purposely neglect your presence like giving you the cold shoulder
– Quick and slow to ignore
These are now very quick ideas, but I would need to define them more in-depth.

Someone also mentioned adding motion of roaming around slowly in the absence of a face, and becomes startled when it finds one. I think that’s a great idea and it would really help in creating a character.

References / Inspiration

Pinokio


I think this is the most recent and well-known project showcasing personality in an inanimate object. The lamp really takes on a character and tries to interact with the person (although the person’s interaction with the lamp is a bit exaggerated). I could definitely take some notes from the motion and try to incorporate that into my mirrors.

(In)Security Camera // Silvia Ruzanka


This piece is already 10 years old! I like how it uses a security camera and reverses its purpose. The motion is a bit jerky though and personally I think the placement of the camera is too high. It’s weird when the camera is pointing upwards. It cuts of the interactions between the user and the camera. Perhaps that was the purpose of it…

Audience // Chris O’Shea


Reminds of meerkats following and staring at you. Really great how the number of mirrors creates a character as a whole. I don’t think it would have succeeded with only 1 or a couple of mirrors. Something to keep in mind when I’m developing my idea further

Michael

01 Apr 2013

1) Meng’s Pepper’s Ghost project

Pepper's Ghost

Meng’s interaction project was what originally got me thinking about my capstone.  Her work involved visualizing different maps in three dimensions using a small Pepper’s Ghost apparatus.  The Pepper’s Ghost illusion works by projecting an image onto an angled piece of glass, which causes it to appear to float in space.  Meng’s map layers and images could be viewed simultaneously by changing one’s viewing angle.  I like the idea of being able to peer around layers and data to see what lies beneath or behind it, and I would like to incorporate this idea into my capstone.  I think that the Pepper’s Ghost apparatus may not be the best suited tool for this, though, and I hope to find a way of interacting with layered data on a two-dimensional screen.

 

2) GigaPan Time Machine and Solar Dynamics Observatory

SDO image

Time Machine is a project out of the CREATE Lab that allows users to view and create zoomable time-lapse videos.  Similar to the GigaPan project, very high resolution interactions are made possible on even modest internet connections because of smart fetching of tiled data.  The project has created time-lapse videos from photos of plants growing to data from the Landsat and Modus satellites and images of the sun from the Solar Dynamics Observatory.  I’m particularly entranced by the time lapse of the sun.  It’s amazing to see solar flares that dance across the surface of the sun and arc over spaces large enough to fit several earths inside.  It’s also possible to explore images of the sun taken from different wavelengths, allowing for visualizations of not only visible light, but also the infrared and ultraviolet spectra and the magnetosphere.  Unfortunately switching between these fixed spectra is the only digital interaction in Time Machine (meaning that only one frequency can be viewed at a time), which means that it is hard to draw connections between activity at one frequency versus another, even though the behavior varies wildly.  I would like to create a way of viewing multiple layers at once, either combined or displayed separately but in a way which allows a viewer to see events in at least two different frequencies at once.

 

3) Panamap

panamap 2  Panamap 1

This company uses a patented process to create physical maps that change the information they show depending on the angle at which they are viewed.  Three different layers can be seen on a single map.  My understanding of the technology is that it is very similar to the little plastic animated cards that show simple movements (such as a dinosaur walking) when the card is tilted back and forth.  What’s interesting to me about this project is that it suggests one method of interaction to view a multi-layered map (tilting up and down).  I want to think about similar ways to manipulate and view layers, especially digital ones on either a fixed screen or a tablet.  Again, there might be an idea here which could help me visualize multiple frequencies of sun imagery.

 

4) Minecraft Dynamic Map

Screen Shot 2013-04-01 at 5.23.01 PM

Of course I had to post at least one thing about Minecraft.  This site shows a dynamically-updated view of a fairly well-populated Minecraft server map, including day/night lighting and player positions.  The map is zoomable to a fairly extreme degree, which lets the user find and discover all of the various buildings and settlements that different groups of players have formed over time. Some of them seem abandoned, while others are almost always occupied.  Maps of Minecraft worlds aren’t particularly unique, but the fluid way in which this one is explorable and the fact that it updates itself constantly is new to me.  I would like to incorporate the ability to stream fresh data into my final project in some capacity.

Anna

01 Apr 2013

For my capstone, I’m pretty sure I’d like to carry forward my Interactivity project, Imisphyx IV, and turn it into something a bit more interesting. That said, this is going to be a tricky post — because honestly I probably wouldn’t be trying to build what I have in mind if I’d ever seen anything in the space that really satisfied me. In fact, my own project probably won’t either. Call me picky.

I’m running with the notion that this post will continue to expand as a poke around the space and make new discoveries. For starters, though, here are a few things related to my concept that sit peacefully in my brain.

Nonlinear tangible storytelling of a Jorge Luis Borges (also highly nonlinear) story.

Augmented Shadow from Joon Y Moon on Vimeo. (Thanks to John G. for suggesting this one!)

Arcanes from Ugo Bagnarosa on Vimeo

Neurofiction (A present from Can!)