PComp Motor Lab and Final Project Idea
Now that the insanity of presenting for Red’s class is over, I can finally catch up with the last of the mandatory labs for PComp and figure out what I want to do for a final.
blog
Antonius Wiriadjaja combines techniques from creative writing, cognitive science, and guerrilla theatre to tell stories in new media.
He is currently pursuing a master's degree at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).
PComp Motor Lab and Final Project Idea
Now that the insanity of presenting for Red’s class is over, I can finally catch up with the last of the mandatory labs for PComp and figure out what I want to do for a final.
Antenna Design’s Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger presented their body of work to Red Burns’s Applications class on November 2, 2010. I was grouped together with Geetha, Eric, Doug and Ara to present our reactions to Antenna’s presentation. Keeping with the Applications course protocol, we were given only a week to prepare and 25 minutes to present.
We all agreed that part of Antenna’s credo is that industrial design is an intervention of public and psychologic space. But what we were most impressed by was their ability to make things better with less.
An overdue write up of my group’s media controller project.
ASSIGNMENT:
Make a physical device that controls a medium in real-time, so that the user can change her actions and see changes as they affect the medium. Media can be video, audio, sound, physical media like paint or ink, and others. This is a group assignment.
i COOL STICKS2010 !
Introducing the Cool Sticks Duemiladieci, the fantastically amazing device that will revolutionize your world of noodle soup eating. The Cool Sticks will fan your hot food as you eat, controlling temperature with the speed of a servo. Just imagine. No more burnt tongues. It doesn’t slice, it doesn’t slice, but it sure as hell blows! Comes with one cloud altar and processing sketch.
This week’s lab helped me figure out how to parse multiple serial values from Arduino to Processing by splitting them up with punctuation. It’s proving real helpful to finish the Processing and Arduino sketches for my group’s media controller project.
Last summer, I walked around the park with my friend Adorable and took some shots/videos. We’re finally getting around to showing them off.
This week, Anh, Guang and I began working on our Media Controller project, which was originally to create a glove with FSRs and with flex sensors sewn in that can send serial signals to a PC and play sound samples. So I tweaked this week’s lab assignment to graph the degree that a flex sensor is bent.
I decided to observe the Big Piano at FAO Schwartz as a piece of public interactive technology used by multiple people.
The walking piano was invented in 1976, but got its fame from the 1988 film Big. The Zoltar Machine was actually my favorite interactive tech in the movie, but I have yet to find a real fortune telling machine that can turn me big. So I spent an afternoon with my friends’ kids jumping up and down on the keys of the toy store’s giant piano instead.
This is my response to the only take-home individual assignment for Red Burns’s Applications of Interactive Technologies course: Take the M5 bus from one end of Manhattan to the other and respond with a five page essay.
Reflections on the M5
I am refusing to do the first half of this assignment; to stay on the M5 bus the entirety of its route just for the sake of observation is absurd and pompous. This bus shouldn’t be treated as some sort of graduate school blood pact ceremony, welcoming the well-educated few to view the natives of this city air conditioned behind thick windows. It’s disingenuous for us to take up our monocles and dissect this city like a butterfly pinned at the wings.
Tom Igoe’s Wednesday morning class’s stupid pet tricks, all in one convenient video. I know the last text screen currently says Spring 2010. I was getting kicked out of the floor and didn’t proofread it enough. I’ll fix it tomorrow.(fixed!)
Stupid Pet Trick: Musical Chair
ASSIGNMENT:
Stupid Pet Trick. Make a simple physically interactive device that uses the skills you’ve learned in the labs. It must respond to a physical action or series of actions a person takes, and it must be amusing, surprising, or otherwise engaging.
REACTION:
I created an interactive chair that lets two or more people play everyone’s favorite party game, Musical Chairs. The users interact with the chair by walking around it in a circle while it plays a melody. When the melody stops, one of the users must sit down to win the game and play the winning tune. If a user sits down before the melody ends, the chair vibrates angrily.
I just read about this American Sign Language to American English translation glove, powered by flex sensors, accelerometer and voicebox shield. It goes well with the week’s reading on design/disability. (by Carnegie Mellon students, via sparkfun)
This week’s lab was all about electronics so we didn’t have to bring out the Arduino, which I’m real happy about because mine is stuck inside a used kleenex box.
PComp Week 2: Analog I/O & Fantasy Gamelan Saron Demung
This week I learned how to read and write analog signals to/from the Arduino. Combined with the switch I learned to make last week, I created this phenomenal device that lets the user control how brightly an LED shines depending on how hard a force sensing resistor is pressed, and what color depending on whether the switch is closed or open.
When it comes to physical computing, I had always relied on the kindness of strangers. So I was mighty proud when I actually got my first Arduino program to work all by myself — with the guidance of every student around me that I could bother, of course.
I live on the border of Jackson Heights and Elmhurst in Queens, the most diverse county in the United States and probably in the world. Here, Colombian street vendors selling arepas outside Sari stores blend seamlessly with Korean spas and Chinese bakeries. Every store has a sign in at least two languages, and not always one in English.
I love this neighborhood. Where else in the world would you find a store that specializes in selling electronic translators? It’s the perfect place to do my first assignment for Physical Computing: Take a walk around your neighborhood and take a count of every interaction with a sensor you see.
based on the hasaportfolio theme by matt mcinerney
