Initial presentation of my final project for the Rest of You class at ITP.

I’m logging forces experienced by a bicycle {rider} when traveling through an urban environment. Many of these forces go unnoticed by the rider focused in the action of riding.

I’m looking to utilize mobile GPS-enabled handsets as a central part of the sensor platform to take advantage of their increasing ubiquity and a natural tendency for riders to carry a handset at all times. External sensors and hardware may be connected to these handsets to measure specific metrics, such as light and sound levels, air quality, proximity, heart rate, stress, breathing, work, attitude, speed and vibration.

While watching Dennett’s TED talk on consciousness, Pinker’s on the myth of violence, and Helen Fisher’s love+hate, I discovered that illusions occur due to a lack of perception of reality, but illusion are part of our consciousness. Having said that, the world is very ambiguous place were the brain tries to reconstruct reality through limited sensory input.  if our consciousness is composed of an estimated guess of reality, could reality itself be an illusion?

So what do we need to understand the full picture?

The better understanding of consciousness through evolution and technology is causing certain human traits to change. I’m defining violence as a part of our reality and with its understanding, real violence is becoming less necessary to people’s conciousness. Over an extended period of time, I believe humans are changing how violence is expressed and experienced through new and interactive media.

I don’t know how long violence has been part of reality, but it has defined human history mostly through wars. We definitely don’t burn witches or feed humans to lions as a spectacle or in order to please a regime any more. Treating people as sub-human has also been diminishing thanks to civil rights. Violence has been detrimental to humankind’s prosperity through time, yet I feel that it is a human need.

Are we less violent than our ancestors? According to Pinker, yes we are less violent, and we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. Can we say we are less violent? Real acts of violence are in decline, and I think this is due because violence is transferring into a digital world were a user satisfies the need vicariously. We now experience acts of violence through broadcast and interactive media on a screen.  Through violent movies and video games violence comes to our reality distorted, an illusion that we think it’s real.

Punishments, gore, and deaths.

Public displays of violence due to punishment and entertainment has declined immensely. Human sacrifices were the first ones to go, for this I am glad. Imagine a football game ending with the losing team is killed. This Mesoamerican Game and Child-sacrifices were popular and part of society when their particular societies thrived. Pinker talks about this bizarre for of  17th century French entertainment as cats were burned alive for laughs.

Real violence is in decline.

Pinker points at how violent we were in the past and how gore in the public eye was something accepted within a society. Today we don’t witness gruesome acts of violence unless they are television or in video games.

I feel that violent video games and movies satisfy a certain thirst for violence. From Street Fighter to Man Haunt violence is present in different degrees as well as it is present in most movies in existence. In the public setting, arcade/restaurant/bar establishments where the majority of arcade games have some sort of weapon attached to it makes me believe that we are still violent. It’s harmless, yet it is present, and I wonder why? Some people like to shot and kill things I suppose. We keep violence virtual in our movies and games when we feel that it is real.

We experience a large amount of violence today in the 21st century through media. Through telecommunications we are aware of genocide, death, disasters, or other act of violence and their consequences. Reporting has diluted through the population giving us virtual access to their individual lives. We care for victims of acts of violence thanks to a better understanding of the outcome of violence. I think we now prefer to be cosmopolitan, share thoughts and live in a healthy environment.

Has the actual need of violence changed it’s source? Are we fulfilling our need of violence by watching violent movies and playing video games? The emulation of violence on a screen gives us the best resolution of violent acts that we can experience. Is our mind being tricked into believe that this violence is real thus satisfying this need? Will violence disappear from the real world? If the world is becoming a larger community where sustainability has to be achieved, then violence shouldn’t exist.

This can answers Pinker’s question of “what are we doing right to help the decline of violence?” Is violence being transferred into another realm were it is less harmful to society? I believe by experiencing the illusion of violence in a screen, human beings can understand why we are violent without harming other fellow humans.

The Delivery from cindy wong on Vimeo.

What happens when you give 5 ITP students a camera to shoot in New York City? A complete mashup involving slasher horror, ninjas, film noir, and a giant Japanese TV mascot. Purely an exercise for our own enjoyment, I don’t expect Hollywood to come knocking anytime soon.
Equipment: with a Panasonic HD camera, edited in Final Cut Pro. Domo-kun costume made by Mindy Tchieu.

For the Rest Of You final Mustafa Bagdatli and I will be continuing working on Bed_Data, which is a matrix of FSRs that aim to detect pressure being exerted onto a bed surface. The plan is to log users’ bed behavior to tell a story.

I asked myself: What are my bed stories and how is my bed making me happy?

The bed as a gestural interface.

Ideally we’ll use body gestures to control visualizations for different the different bed behaviors. From sitting down to sex, these body gestures need to be recognized before we go any further with this project.

How do we interact with a bed?

Sitting down or laying there are instances where the user may be sitting down on the edge or laying on the bed doing a passive activity.

How are you sleeping? Sleep can be characterized by different positions. What is my most common sleeping position? How long do i keep that position through out my sleep? How can your sleeping position define me?

How well are you sleeping with your partner? I’m curious about the way you sleep with your significant other. Is it a better experience when you are with someone on the bed? Do you spoon much?

What about sexytime? As young adult this is obviously the most fun activity you can do on your bed. How much sex? For how long? What comes after sex? Do you cuddle much?

Could it tweet?

A few friends envisioned and encapsulated a scenario as a conversation around the bed:

Wife: “Hey honey, we haven’t made the bed tweet in a while”

Husband: “Well, I have been so stress at work that…..”

Bed intelligence

If a bed could talk, what would it say? Giving a bed consciousness through this FSR matrix makes me wonder how a bed sees the user? How can a bed give the user feedback? I think through logging data, bed_data can probably know you better than you know yourself, in bed. Are you on or off your bed? For how long? Are you getting enough sleep? What are you lacking? These are some questions that could be answered.

Bed_Games

The bed can be a controller (up, down, left, right, and button) for a game that simulates a race. Using left and right movements, which proved to be the more natural ones, there is enough control to do a simple game.

2. While you are having sex you could be inspired with a visualization that is playful and encouraging. Some say love moves the world, and with this in mind. How can love making move the world? This is what I’m thinking for a sexy visualization.

There are multiple activities a user does on a bed that can tell a story. From reading a book to having the time of your life. So we are asking ourselves how can we visualize this?

Proposal

We first aim to detect a user’s bed behavior starting by recognizing patterns of sitting, laying down, sleeping, or having sex. By logging this data there could be a lot of insight on a user’s life, in bed.

The bed as a controller. We are brainstorming of a first person game that simulates the illusion of racing or traveling. We are still debating weather a bobsledding game or a space adventure.

I just finished presenting a session on “Augmented Reality in the Classroom” at this year’s NJEDge.Net Conference. For those of you who stopped by, thanks! Here’s a quick recap of some of the videos that I referred to during the talk. My own Augmented Reality demos can be found by clicking on the “Augmented Reality” category tag to the left.

Link: The REACH Project: Infinite Games for Pediatric Rehabilitation

Augmented Reality – The Future of Education

A Visit to Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab

A Soldier’s Therapy Session: Using Virtual Reality to help Patients with PTSD

Topps Baseball Cards in Augmented Reality

Mixed Reality Learning Media: Effects on Classroom Instruction

In-Place Augmented Reality 3D Sketching of Mechanical Systems

Fashionista: Webcam Social Shopper

New York Nearest Subway iPhone 3GS Application

Unveiling the Sixth Sense: Wearable Augmented Reality

Xbox Natal

The Daily Show: Augmented Reality in Iowa Caucus

“After Goldsworthy” is a video sculpture by Marco Castro and Ari Joseph. A tent-like structure serves as a projection surface for mapped video projections. The viewer inside the tent is immersed in a synthesized natural environment, akin to being enveloped by the construction of an Andy Goldsworthy piece. 

The piece was created for Video Sculpture, a class at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). 

Music: Ted (Bibio Remix) by Clark.

BKPK (Brooklyn parking)

• “Connecting people to find resources they need.”
• The project is aimed to relieve the burdens of finding parking by creating a community.

Materials,References:

• ushahidi = geo database
• imified = request response (conduit, agent)
• google maps routing engine
• open street maps….check it out.
• JSON, JavaScript, PHP, MySql.

Development plan:

• install Ushahidi
• implement google maps or openstreetmaps
• imfied + twitter feed

Here’s the video of my IgniteNYC talk courtesy of @YoungImpact:

I’ve been experimenting with ways in which AR can be used to control other systems, including Second Life. Here is a quick demo of an AR cube that is tied to a Second Life “chair” that my avatar is sitting on. In the future I would like to set up a complete control system for an avatar using AR or color tracking. The system that is demonstrated below uses the following:

1. Single marker tracking to orient a cube in 3D space
2. When visible, the 3D transformation matrix of the cube is sent to my webserver
3. In Second Life, the “seat” that my avatar is sitting on calls my webserver and asks for the current transformation matrix. After unpacking the data it reorients the cube in Second Life 3D space.

My dog Prue co-stars in the demo video below. Perhaps this one should be titled “dog-mented reality” instead (I know, it’s a terrible joke!)

Below is an Arduino sketch that uses the CD74HC4067 multiplexer / demultiplexer to read analog values from all 16 channels. This gives you the ability to read from 16 analog inputs while only using one analog input and four digital pins.


/*
CD74HC4067 Analog / Digital Multiplexing

This sketch reads analog values from all 16 of the multiplexer pins.

created 17 Nov 2009
by Rory Nugent

The following pins must be connected:

Digital Pin 2 -> S0
Digital Pin 3 -> S1
Digital Pin 4 -> S3
Digital Pin 5 -> S4

Analog In Pin 0 -> SIG

*/

// Mux analog / digital signal pin
#define sig 0 // Analog In Pin 0

// Mux channel select pins
#define setPin0 2 // Digital Pin 2
#define setPin1 3 // Digital Pin 3
#define setPin2 4 // Digital Pin 4
#define setPin3 5 // Digital Pin 5

void setup()
{
Serial.begin(9600);

pinMode(setPin0, OUTPUT);
pinMode(setPin1, OUTPUT);
pinMode(setPin2, OUTPUT);
pinMode(setPin3, OUTPUT);
}

void loop()
{
// for loop to cycle through all mux channels, 0 - 15
for(int i = 0; i < 16; i++)
{
int sigValue = readSig(i); // read from a mux channel

// print the analog / digital value to the serial monitor
Serial.print(sigValue);
Serial.print("\t"); // TAB
}
Serial.println(); // NEW LINE
}

// NAME: readSig
// INPUT: mux channel as an integer, 0 - 15
// RETURN: analog value of the selected mux channel as an integer
int readSig(int channel)
{
// use the first four bits of the channel number to set the channel select pins
digitalWrite(setPin0, bitRead(channel, 0));
digitalWrite(setPin1, bitRead(channel, 1));
digitalWrite(setPin2, bitRead(channel, 2));
digitalWrite(setPin3, bitRead(channel, 3));

// read from the selected mux channel
int sigValue = analogRead(sig);

// return the received analog value
return sigValue;
}

On Twitter this weekend:

cshirky: The New Yorker still runs cartoons of crazy people carrying placards. What do 25 y.o’s make of that? In their world, crazy people have blogs
8:07 AM Nov 15th

leesean: @cshirky 25ish y.o.’s like me make mashup/remixes of crazy people with placards and put them on YouTube http://bit.ly/x0BQV
10:28 AM Nov 15th

cshirky: RT @leesean: @cshirky 25ish y.o.’s like me make mashup/remixes of crazy people with placards and put them on YouTube http://bit.ly/x0BQV
1:14 PM Nov 15th

I created Jump (The Bailout Bash) with Elizabeth Fuller for a class at ITP last year (Communications Lab with Marianne Petit).

Photo by James Duncan Davidson.

I gave an updated version of the It’s Cool to be Flat talk at Ignite NYC last night.  I created the presentation with Nicholas DiBiase of Hepnova, and gave a previous version of the talk at ITP30 Pecha Kucha.

You can also download the presentation here: [PDF] [PPT]
UPDATE (11/17/2009): Here are my presentation notes. Hopefully the video will be on YouTube soon.

1. Hi. Iʼm LS. I am a creative technologist, and masters student at ITP, the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. I developed this talk with Nicholas DiBiase of HEPNOVA Multimedia, who gave a version at Phoenix Design Week last month. This is a manifesto. This is a provocation. Itʼs cool to be flat. Cool like McLuhan. The world is flat. Letʼs embrace it.

2. A specter is haunting the world of the web and visual design. The specter is the gratuitous use of gradients, drop shadows, and faux 3D. This slide is a Wall of Shame. Join me in a holy alliance to exorcise this specter.

3. Welcome to Wankery, Inc. 2.0. Reflections and gradients do not equal instant web 2.0. These visual artifacts are a cheap trompe lʼoeil that dupes clients into paying more for ugly. This slide will be the death of me, one of us will have to go.

4. Design is not a dark art. Art for artʼs sake has its place, but design for design sake forgets the user. As designers, we need to be comfortable with our craft, Itʼs OK, really. Design is about function, not about showing off chops and gadgetry.

5. Design is compressed communication and not decoration. (seems obvious, but maybe those who proliferate gradients and reflections didnʼt get the memo) Good design expresses a lot of information in a short amount of space or time.

6. Simplicity is key. Condense and clarify, it donʼt clutter or complicate. Strip away the unwarranted and the unnecessary. Make positive use of negative space. Silence is negative space in time (pause)

7. Avoid pseudo 3-D effects and embrace flat. Work with rather than fight against with the nature of the 2-D media in which we work, be it print or a computer screen. Work with your constraints, and make use of other techniques, like bold color contrasts, interesting textures, and plenty of negative space,

8. Letʼs rise up in a tidal wave of change to bring flat back to the interwebs. This is restoration, not revolution. Flatness has a long and proud tradition through history and across world cultures, from this Hokusai woodblock print, to Western modern art.

9. From the Ancient Greeks to the Pacific Northwest Indians, flat art is internationally awesome. Artisans and craftspeople have worked with the constraints of the media and materials, and made effective use of bold lines and color contrasts.

10. In the Western Modern art tradition, artists like Mondrian, Matisse, and Kandinsky embraced the flatness of their canvases, through minimal, flat forms, their paintings are in a way, low resolution, high contrast A provocative challenge against the hegemony of traditional perspective.

11. Two more examples. Lichtensteinʼs work is comic book flat, while Calder is seriously simple. Lichtenstein makes the mechanics of the flat page a central element While Calder uses the intensity of his color contrast to take flat reductionism to an emotional extreme.

12. From cartoons to gallery walls. Ren & Stimpy to Murakami. Flat is back to the forefront of pop culture. Flat knows no distinction between the high and the low. Murakamiʼs superflat explores the superficiality of pop culture, but only the shallow know themselves, so thatʼs ok. *Thanks Oscar Wilde.

13. Visual and web designers can take some cues from the modernist architects. A simple ABC from Alvar Aaalto to the Bauhaus to Le Corbusier. Strip away the frivolous And cleanse the degenerate decadence of digital rococo that is rotting away the soul of the internet.

14. Letʼs take it to the bridge with a musical analogy. Hair rock vs. Punk Rock. We want to be punk. Do you want to contort yourself around a polytonal 11th chord with sus 4 flat 2? Or do you want to play a punk rock power chord? Think about it?

15. Here are some memorable and versatile “flat” logos. IBM lconveys the timelessness of Big Blue Chanel takes simplicity and turns it into elegant luxury Ubuntu conveys its values of community and sharing
BP is sinister greenwashing, but aesthetically brilliant And the Wu Tang, is Wu Tang

16. The formula is simple. FLAT is function over ornament. Get rid of the excessive. Elegance is not ornament. The slide speaks for itself. Reflections are the worst kind of vanity.

17. Design is about conveying your values and your vibes. Even without gradients, drop shadows and reflections, you can communicate with bold use of color, line, and contrast. Say more with less.

18. FLAT builds character. Hello Kitty is just a few lines and dots. She doesnʼt even have a mouth, but she is part of a multimillion $$ global empire Their simplicity means that they are accessible and universal, we can project our own meanings onto these characters. These 2 guys below are ODI and AMO, two characters I created last year.

19. This is a challenge to embrace the values of Flatness. This is the DAO of FLAT. Itʼs COOL to be FLAT. Be bold, be iconic, make a statement. Letʼs return to the values of simplicity and clarity in design.

Want to philosophize about flat? Or just tell me that Iʼm wack? Find me on the interwebs at LEESEAN.net or @leesean on Twitter. Thank you!

Here’s a photo by Carlo Demarchis of me presenting last night:

For my  web development final, I knew I wanted to pursue my interests in social media, interactive design, and multimedia.  I’m pretty interested in technology that helps bring people together over the web to communicate/interact. So, how can I make it fun?

FireChat is an interactive video website that serves as a hub for friends to deliver greeting card messages. Rather then have friends sign a paper card, why not have an electronic card where your friends can all personally deliver a video message to your intended recipient on 1 screen? Go to the website. Sign in. Create an e-card page. Upload your video message. Invite your friends and family to your e-card webpage so that they can upload their video messages too! When you’re ready, you can email your video-card recipient and they will get to see everyone’s well-wishes on 1 page in video! You know how some people hate having to sign cards? Sometimes, it’s easier to just say what you want outloud. Don’t worry, unlike handwritten notes, you can just re-record your message till you get it right.

Examples:

A couple of weeks ago I put together a process for allowing access to a hardware serial port from JavaScript. I thought I would point to the documentation page here and allow the comments section of this post to be a place where questions could be answered and so on.

Without further ado, here it is:
JavaScript Serial

This week I decided to try and hook up an augmented reality scene so that it can be driven by SMS messages. The app below lets you vote for your favorite flower using your mobile phone – just text the appropriate code (”craigk red” or “craigk blue”) to 41411 to cast your vote!

The system is built using the public version of the TextMarks SMS aggregation system, a pair of back-end Perl scripts and, of course, Flash + Papervision.

Vote for your favorite flower!

Check out a video of the project in action:

I managed to control a canvas object’s color, y-position, and width via blue-tooth. I used Qik to document my results. I used 2 photocells and an FSR to change the square, just to demonstrate how Shawns’ applet works with blue-tooth. I believe i want to expand this and substitute the FSR with electrodes and be able to control the internet with my brain waves.

Here is the link to the website.

Here is the documentation for the JavaScript serial applet. Feel free to use firebug to look at the java script functions that connect arduino to js.

For my Final Project, I decided to combine my ICMW and PComp classes together and produce a single idea: Meet TweetChime. TweetChime is an interactive music chime that  that will take specially coded Twitter messages people send to you and transforms them into melody where you are. What makes that so special?

Whether a friend wants to express “Good Luck!”, “Congratulations!”, “Have a Great Day” or “Thinking Of You”, TweetChime transforms their greeting in a harmonious patterned musical chime melody in real time. Be pleasantly surprised when you hear the ringing of notes and know that someone – out there– is thinking of you. As an owner, you can decipher what people are messaging you based on the musical melody overheard.

Interaction: Person tweets a message through a special code setup. Example: @cwong08 says, “@tweetchime 65 #tweetchime.
Among the selected messages are examples like “Have a Good Day!” “Miss You,” “Good Luck!”, “I Love You,” that are given specific number codes etc. Currently, numbers 65-68 are coded. The owner of the TweetChime machine will log on to the TweetChime website and activate their device. From there, the TweetChime website scans an RSS feed for impending tweets  for @tweetchime and refreshes your website with appropriate melody when triggered by friends and family’s tweets.

Under the Hood: TweetChime is powered by Javascript, PHP, and an Arduino. The TweetChime website is built with Javascript to interact serially with the Arduino (via USB port). TweetChime website uses AJAX to scoop data from a PHP script that reads a Twitter RSS feed and parses numerical codes from people’s submitted tweets.  From there, it passes those byte values to the Arduino which then outputs it into the message’s cued  melody.

Setup: Arduino, PHP, Javascript, 5 wind chime tubes, servo motors, 5 mini metal tubes (strikers)

Each wind chime is paired with a servo motor that is wired to the Arduino.  When the Arduino checks for digital read messages, it will receive the values and trigger the servo motor to tap the chime in series. A message like “Have a Good Day!” would sound differently then a message like “Miss You.”

Here’s a video of me testing the sensor motors against the wind chimes I purchased to see if they’d resonate.

Testing Servo Motor for Final Project Use from cindy wong on Vimeo.

I researched for sleep and ways to improve sleep for a better conscious state. This lead me to research sleep stages, circadian rhythm, and light therapy. SAD (winter blues), Jetlag, delayed sleep phase syndrome, and insomnia are some of the most common physiological disorders that affect our well-being.

So what is sleep? We detach ourselves from our sensors to rest physically and mentally. The why is obvious, we all know what happens when we don’t sleep. It is a vital biological function.

Sleep logging: Here is a link to yawnlog, a beta project that logs your sleep by having the user tweet sleep habits.

Sleep Architecture:

During sleep our brain doesn’t necessarily stop working, in contrast to our body the brain keeps functioning. In adults, sleep is divided into two states REM and NREM sleep (rapid eye movement and none).

NREM sleep consists in four different stages with different EEG activity. Here is a link to the different sleep stages. The architecture of sleep is very delicate, if a person wakes up in stage 4, usually they wake up tired. This is the last stage of NREM sleep, the next stage is REM sleep. This state is where we dream the most.

“Small structures in the brain called suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) coordinate circadian rhythms. The SCN, in turn, is very sensitive to the presence or absence of light. This may explain why daytime sleep has been found to be less restful than nighttime sleep.”

Circadian Rhythm

Blue Light:

“Blue light exposure may be a countermeasure for fatigue, particularly during the night.” This article from the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School reinforces me take on how blue light (blue; 460 nm) may help reduce fatigue.

“The subjects exposed to blue light consistently rated themselves less sleepy, had quicker reaction times, and had fewer lapses of attention during the performance tests compared to those who were exposed to green light. They also had changes in their brain activity patterns that indicated a more alert state.”

Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has done research which indicates that if we don’t get a strong exposure to bright, blue light in the morning, it can delay our circadian rhythm, making it hard to fall asleep that night. Here we have a list of their research:

• Light can alleviate seasonal depression.
• Light can increase the length and quality of sleep.
• Light can consolidate sleep/activity patterns in Alzheimer’s Disease patients.
• Light can improve the performance of night-shift workers.
• Light can improve weight gain in premature infants.
• Light activation of the circadian system is affected by a newly discovered photoreceptive mechanism in the eye.
• Light regulates melatonin, which has been shown to reduce breast cancer growth.
• Light has a direct impact on cortical brain activity.

“Until recently, it was thought that the eye was just used to see. BWH researchers and others have shown that it is also used to detect light for other purposes, such as resetting the body clock to the 24-hour day.”

This other article focuses more on blue light as the mean to treat circadian rhythm disorders. Also, bright light therapy is a common treatment for seasonal affective disorder. White light is applied for a small period of time in the morning to help depression.

Products

Phillips has these products in the market. These products claim to improve your day by having your circadian cycle restored, improving your mood by waking up naturally. All of these claims seem promising to people’s happiness. This is another product that aims to treat sleep disorders the same way.

On waking up naturally i found this for a dawn simulator: “A dawn simulator gradually turns on your bedside lamp in the morning, before you wake up, so that your retina (not you — you’re still asleep!) “sees” the light show up at the time you choose, increasing gradually just as natural sunlight does, over about 30-45 minutes.”

I did research to improve the Bed_data project. Here is an article on sleep movement tracking (the study of sleep and circadian rhythms, provides an acceptably accurate estimate of sleep patterns).

Materials and sensors

I found this instructable on a 2×2 soft fsr matrix. I wonder how scalable this can be, so I emailed Pluesa in hopes to learn more about soft sensors.

Here is a company that has conductive foam and other products for your diy sensor needs. Here is the company Mustafa and I bought the foam for our sensors: conductivefoam.com

Also here’s Kate Hartman’s soft sensing report.

In conclusion, light therapy can help restore the circadian rhythm if applied correctly. Blue light stops the production of melatonin, which is a hormone that induces sleep. A dawn simulator alarm can help different circadian rhythm disorders according to the amount of light you can get in the morning. Our cognitive functions are weakened by a lack of sleep, thus we can improve our sleep habits by logging them and resetting sleep cycles.

Please RSVP to: itp.rsvp@nyu.edu

More info here: http://itp.nyu.edu/bigscreens2009/

In a team of 5 people, create a 2-minute movie that is planned with a storyboard. Deciding we wanted a rich, narrative perspective sequence, my team divided the movie into 4 distinct chapters that delve into different movie genres. The movie, itself? Let’s say, it’s a tale of a serial killer and the hunt to find him…

The Carbon Peep Show is a project that I co-developed with Adam Harvey over the summer for Artist as Citizen. Developed as an entry for AAC’s  Burning Embers competition, The Carbon Peep Show is designed to showcase potential environmental scenarios that may play out based on the level of global warming that the Earth experiences over the next hundred years or so.

Upon visiting the Carbon Peep Show, visitors are presented with a closed set of theater curtains.  Behind the curtains lie a series of climate change themed videos that depict ecological consequences that may happen to our global environment if the world warms by a certain number of degrees.  The only way to watch a video, however, is to “pay” for it using a dollar bill.  Simply holding up a dollar bill to the highlighted rectangle on your screen (assuming that you have an active webcam on your computer) will advance the peep show to the next video in the playlist.

Hold up a dollar to watch the next video

In addition, the Carbon Peep Show is designed to be part of a larger conversation in which responses from the community can be showcased and broadcasted to the world at large.  By clicking on the ‘Participate’ button, visitors can submit their own video responses to be included in the project.  Will we be the victims of environmental disaster?  Will our cities become submerged under rising ocean levels?  Or, perhaps, will our ecosystem find its way towards a new equilibrium?  Submit your response and let the world know what you think!

The Carbon Peep Show wants to hear from you!

I am here at CMU in Pittsburgh at a conference called Mobile Art && Code. Great talks, great workshops, glad I came.

I am doing a workshop called Interactive Telephony for New Media Arts, here is the full set of notes.

One thing that I did for the workshop is a put together an Asterisk driven webservice in PHP for getting at live phone call data. If you have been working projects that get information from asterisk or use phone calls to control other applications, it might be worth checking out.

PHP AGI Script:

#!/usr/bin/php -q
<?PHP
require('/var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/phpagi.php');

$agi = new AGI();

$agi->stream_file("vm-extension");
$return = $agi->wait_for_digit(10000);
while ($return['result'] > 0)
{
        $ascii = chr($return['result']);
        $agi->say_number($ascii);
        file_put_contents("/var/www/html/webservice/data.txt",time() . "," . $agi->request["agi_uniqueid"] . "," . $agi->request["agi_callerid"] . "," . $ascii . "\n",FILE_APPEND);
        $return = $agi->wait_for_digit(100000);
}
?>

PHP Web Service Script:

<?
	// The client will send a timestamp if it want's new stuff from the timestamp
	$timestamp = 0;
	if (isset($_GET['ts']))
	{
		$timestamp = $_GET['ts'];
	}

	$data = file_get_contents("data.txt");
	$dataarray = explode("\n",$data);
	if ($timestamp > 0)
	{
		// Send everything from the timestamp forward
		for ($i = sizeof($dataarray) - 10; $i < sizeof($dataarray); $i++)
		{
			$currentline = explode(",",$dataarray[$i]);
			if (sizeof($currentline) > 0)
			{
				if ($currentline[0] > $timestamp)
				{
					echo($dataarray[$i]."\n");
				}
			}
		}
	}
	else
	{
		// Just send the last one
		if (sizeof($dataarray) > 1)
		{
			echo($dataarray[sizeof($dataarray)-2]);
		}
	}
?>

Processing Example

I should note that this was built very quickly and therefore somewhat buggy. I don’t think the Processing example is thread safe and the PHP should really be using a database.. Also, the Processing example is a riff off of something Dan Shiffman put together for getting Asterisk and Processing to talk through a Java server.

This week I’ve been playing around with the shared object feature of the Flash Media Server.  So far I’m really liking it!  I was able to whip up a pretty basic prototype of a web-based virtual world without too much fuss – feel free to check it out.

Just me and MC Hammer hanging out in the metaverse

As of today the world can do the following:

1. Avatar identification
2. Synchronous  text-based chat
3. Click-to-move functionality within the world
4. Appearance editor (change your own avatar’s look)

The appearance editor is still very rudimentary, and changes made to your avatar don’t yet ripple out to other users.  I was having a real tough time figuring out how to send out complex AS3 objects using the Shared Object feature of the FMS.  The documentation explicity states that sending any AS3 class via a Shared Object should work. What the documentation fails to tell you is that you need to prepare your classes in a very particular way in order for them to retain their integrity after being serialized by the FMS encoder.

I should have a fix in place for this real soon – I’m uber excited about being able to share non-trivial AS3 objects in real time!

This series of labs were a two-part process. First, we had to learn how to control a DC motor which uses a high current load.  Then, we used H-bridges to control the spin direction of the DC motor.

Transistor Lab

Using DC Motor with Arduino from cindy wong on Vimeo.

So how do you control a high-current DC load such as a DC motor? Transistors, in this case the  TP120 transistor which acts as an electrical switch between the Arduino and power to make the higher current load (in current, voltage)doesn’t overwhelm it. In this scenario, I used a potentiometer to control the spin intensity of the DC Motor. FYI, I learned that soldering a DC motor is easy since the order of the wires, power or ground, doesn’t matter! Check out the video above.

Update: Note that clickety, jerky motion of the DC motor above? Apparently, that is the result of the DC motor receiving too much power. Looks like that DC Motor is meant to run between 3-5V power. The Arduino is blinking (resetting itself) each time as an indicator for us (according to Igoe).

Here’s the Breadboard setup.

DC Motor Control Lab