project listing - Computational
Motion Sketches - Ongoing
This is an ongoing project, in which weekly physical interfaces and built and tested. The overall goal of this project is to acquire a large collection of working prototype interfaces, which can be tested and re-constructed together to find interesting and novel approaches to user interaction.
This is a quick sketch using a copper etched board,a small microprocessor, accelerometer and USB I/O
The recent development of the Nintendo Wii, along with the very recent Apple iPhone, has brought with potential for a rich (and potentially over-saturated) wave of gestural and kinetic user interfaces and experience devices. This project aims to join people who are building devices in this rush of new interfaces, but also build a language and learn from the process. These physical sketches are just that, quick and dirty tests and attempts. They are not meant to be final projects, but the knowledge gained from them as a whole is.
As an ongoing project, I wanted to give myself some constraints. First and foremost, the goal is that the capture device is as simple as possible, having a very simple set of components. These components may appear to be giving very simple information, but will generate very novel input when used in conjunction with each other. For this purpose, I've decided to begin by using nothing but a simple three-axis accelerometer. This allows me to read in these three values, and begin building software and firmware that will generate new results as an interface, while still retaining a sense of familiarity that allows users to easy understand how they use it.
tags: body gesture input interface motion physical
Shift in the Fabric
Concept
As part of my thesis project at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, A Shift in the Fabric was a computationally driven visual installation. As an installation, it creates, analyzes, and reveals nuances of potential networks and infrastructures in our world.
Through the aggregation of approximately 5000 most populated cities in the world, this project visualizes these as nodes in a variety of different ways, showing network characteristics that can be represented in different visual contexts, where viewers can be left to interpret them in an environment.
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Top Left: This is a traditional map view. Here you get a sense of continents and size of cities (based on the diameter of the clouds)
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Top Right: These are examples of "caveman" style networks, where connections are made in tightly regionalized spaces, and occasionally make one leap outside of this area to another location.
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Bottom Left: This is the beginning of the view when exploring an ecosystem of various networks and protocols, all of which share common nodes. Here in this example, different colors represent different types of connections and/or infrastructures.
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Bottom Right: This is an example of a centralized network emitting out of North Africa somewhere.
Having control over the connections, as well as the nodes, allows for flexibility in moving the nodes into different arrangements, thereby allowing us to see different relationships between the nodes when put into different mappings.
This is an example of a rank order by population, in which the cities fan out, allowing you to view characteristics of these nodes from a macro level. Gray connections here represent "caveman" world networks, green represent small world's networks, and the red is the beginning of a centralized connection.
Next Steps
This project is a work in progress. For more information about the project's conception, as well as some of its various branches, view the original thesis section of my website!
Idea Sketch
This project has very simple task: build a tool for innovators, which allows them to do their own idea generation, navigating their own thoughts and connections between words and groupings of words. The use of this tool is easy and harmless:
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Start by typing a few keywords of influence into your workspace. You just start with a few, and then move on to step two.
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Now, you begin free flowing. Like a prisoner escaping prison, let the tunnel reveal connected pieces of ideas that are connected in whatever type of linear thought you like.
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As you begin typing words, the tool begins interrogating you, placing words into the foreground that you've already given it. The tool also does some simple searching to a larger community for words associated with that word you may not be familiar with.
Placed side by side to your mind's words, new idea space is created. Perhaps even idea space already established, a recursion of thought begins. Perhaps paradoxes of thought will even arrive, where a sense of deja-vu and the potential deadly roadblock of thought appear. This at this point, any of the previous words can be rearranged, grouped with other idea spaces saved from previous sessions, further queries to outside sources can be generated. The goal is a tool that is intelligent in its organization of your thought, so that your memory and your associations can be augmented and further paths of thought can be explored.
Currently, this program is not standalone. I hope to upload a web version of this as soon as possible.
I more detailed description and text regarding this project is available here.
Can - N - String
This project is a collaboration with Liubo Borissav, ITP 2005.
As an exploration of networked "objects", this project had a simple mission: recreate the can and string phone, but replace the string with the internet. Our purpose was simple, to keep the metaphor and aesthetics as close to the same as possible on the outer edges, and employ the technology in the middle.
Our device did just that. Using two tin cans, with embedded electronics and micro-controller managed connections to each other, these two devices could be plugged into working cat-5 internet wall plugs, and locate and communicate with each other. Standard audio signal rates posed a problem on devices with so little room for compression and audio filtering, so our output on either end became nuanced and "colored" with the static that the internet often provides. We felt, in many ways, this was an added aesthetic, as it brings to light the distortions whatever technology you employ has.
Unfortunately, this project was never appropriately documented.