December 14, 2009 at 5:06 pm · Filed under Fall 2009
My final project for Lalya Gaye’s Sound, Media, Urban Space class was a system of switches that are closed when water moves across the surface.
The first thing I did was to spray my material with a fixative spray. This made me think about the final application for the project. One of the immediate thoughts was that since the material is water proof it could become a wearable. Imagine a yellow rain coat that makes music as you walk through the rain…
After the spray dried I began to sew lines of conductive thread throughout the fabric. These lines become the positive / negative switches for the project. I’ve included a diagram below:
Once the conductive thread was sewn in it was time to connect the lines to the Arduino. I connected all the positive wires to the ports of the Arduino and all the ground wires to the single ground wire on the Arduino.
On the Arduino itself I used Paul Badger’s TONE library to generate sound when water closes circuits. Paul’s library generates frequencies which the speaker can read as sound.
http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Main/Freqout
The next stage will be to think about how this system can be integrated into something wearable. It never occurred to me to use conductive thread inside of the fabric. Making custom textiles with conductive fabric can eliminate the need to sew wire into canvas and allow things to be better embedded into the piece.
Check back for future updates during the wearable computing class where I will be trying to create textiles that have positive / negative switches embedded inside of it.
March 6, 2009 at 8:50 am · Filed under Inspiration
Creative Director, Robert Cooper, discussing his thoughts on a new creative concept from GE.
Try it out here for yourself!: http://ge.ecomagination.com
February 9, 2009 at 1:48 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Procedure based poetry:
1.) check the blogs you read daily (or go to blogpulse.com)
2.) search for ” red ”
3.) take the sentence that contains the word red and write it down
4.) repeat step 3 until you have gone through all the returned results on the first page.
December 10, 2008 at 11:47 pm · Filed under Fall 2008
The final critique of my first semester at RISD is over. One of the things I enjoyed the most about the final critique was the way everyone came together. First years helping each other set up, second years helping first years and visa versa. Helping Bundith, Rosalinda and Mideum set up gave me a personal look into their process. It was the kind of experience that I don’t think I could have enjoyed at any other digital art graduate program. There is a strong sense of community here.
close up of the wi-fi network visualization program I showed for my final crit.
photo credit: Mary Burge
November 22, 2008 at 8:59 pm · Filed under Fall 2008
This is the documentation for the flash application I made that visualizes wi-fi networks in the area. The desired output device is a mobile phone or portable handheld projector. I’ve organized this post into different sections which document my process.
PROPOSAL
The image below is a mock-up of how I initially envisioned the project. My initial concept was a fully immersive experience using goggles with an attached camera. However I quickly realized that a fully immersive Augmented Reality experience carries with it some problems. Clunky goggles with a mounted camera and the need to carry around the attached computer or be wired to one. I’ll be publishing a more in depth post about my experience with Augmented Reality later.
WIRELESS DETECTION OsXDaily reports about a hidden feature in Terminal that allows full control over the GUI Airport menu utility. From this point I was able to make a cron job that generated an XML file of the data every minute.
VISUALIZATION Once I had an XML feed of the data I had Adobe Flash parse the file to retrieve the wireless SSID and RSSI info. The data is then used to create particle systems in flash that represent the wireless network. I chose cubes for a number of reasons. I liked the reference to bit packets that they seemed to conjure. The three dimensional cube shape allows me to easily change the perspective using data from an accelerometer like that built into an iPhone or laptop which is directly inspired by Johnny Lee’s Ted Talk.
FINAL The final is a work in progress flash application. A video of the application is below.
INSPIRATION
Outside Lies Magic: John R. Stilgoe
This American Life: True ghost story that appeared in a medical journal in 1921. After a “Mrs H” and her family moved into an old rambling house, strange apparitions started appearing…until her brother-in-law figured out the real cause of the ghostly presences… Carbon Monoxide.
My MYVU goggles came in today. While they are not exactly what I was hoping for in terms of image size and quality, they will definitely do the job. I am going to try to incorporate these goggles into a project I am working on in my Network Landscapes class that is trying to visualize bluetooth and wi-fi signals. I am hoping to apply the visualizations to a fully immersive AR (augmented reality) setup.
November 10, 2008 at 10:26 pm · Filed under Fall 2008
Adam Meyer, a senior in the ID program gave a presentation about the LCD multi-touch table he made over the summer. Nipun and I are currently looking into making one for the department on a larger scale.
helping set up before the demo
a demo application running on the multi-touch display.
