The ubiquity of mobile devices gives everyone the possibility of becoming a star and redefined our notions of privacy. Even at this moment, someone could be recording your actions, making you the next accidental YouTube hit.

Painting with Perspective abstractly explores documentation, memory and surveillance. Leveraging WayMarkr technology, each of the items on the pallet in the lower left corresponds to a different mobile phone currently at the show. By choosing a mobile phone from the pallet and dragging the mouse, a participant can paint with the last image taken from the corresponding mobile device. A slider in the middle of the toolbar allows for brush size adjustment.

Once you are done with your collage, type your email address in the lower right hand corner and hit enter to have your collaged emailed to you.

There are three components:

1) A four-digit number that you put on everything you want to track.

2) A cellphone that lets you send simple text messages to check in or out, or to enter in new items.

3) A web application where you can enter and view qualitative and quantitative data on all your stuff, including how, when, and how often you use/buy/replace what you own.

Cell phone these days do it all - voice, text, calendaring, IM, stock quotes, web, etc. But as a result the headsets themselves are unwieldy monstrosities borne of convergence, combining poor interfaces to serve all their input mechanisms. The best of them serve text input reasonably well, but are impossibly large to use for voice. This device provides a high-end user experience of the voice functionality of their phone that\’s fashionable, elegant, and simple.

Botanicalls allows thirsty plants to place phone calls for human help. When humans phone the plants, they orient callers to their habits and characteristics, including how they like to be watered and cared for.
Botanicalls opens a new channel of communication between plants and humans, in an effort to promote successful inter-species cohabitation and understanding.

Cities are crowded places. Ever since the industrial revolution, mass migration to urban spaces has led to increasing problems of overpopulation and related social disorders. On an individual level, overcrowding can lead to or exacerbate agoraphobia, part of a growing problem of general urban anxiety. Responses to this problem — lack of space, lack of privacy — vary, ranging from physical agility (navigating quickly through crowded spaces) to insensitivity (talking loudly on a mobile phone as if in the privacy of one’s own home) to outright violence. What these responses tend to have in common is an element of denial: the individual refuses to acknowledge and analyze the import of the restriction of her space.

Urban Sonar attempts to address this problem by allowing the user to record her personal space over an extended period of time, during which she may move through varied environments that cause different levels of anxiety. The user wears a jacket with four ultrasonic sensors that measure her proximity to other people and objects to her left, right, front and back. The sensors communicate with a Java-enabled mobile phone, which records these four proximity values along with the user’s heartrate. The data can then be uploaded to a server for playback at a later time, allowing the user to consider, with a degree of critical distance, her spatial experience over the course of fixed period of time. Playback consists of an accelerated visual representation, from a birds-eye view, of a constantly shifting geometric representation of the user’s space as it fluctuated during the recorded period.

The goal of the project is to allow (or perhaps force) the user to address and come to terms with the limitations on personal space that are an inherent part of the urban experience. Our hope is that by examining this data, the user can gain a better understanding of her daily experience and begin to come to terms with, and attempt to alleviate, her urban anxiety.

A Java applet loaded onto a fairly common mobile phone connects to a server over the worldwide standard GSM mobile network. It displays information about the current status of assorted sensors in one\’s home and enables the user to change the state of several devices, all remotely.

Using the Smart Shelf from my Networked Objects class, I plan on hooking an Xport and Arduino to connect the shelf to the reader. This tag will be on the book. When the child takes the book off the shelf, this action will act as the \”click.\” Pre-recorded readings will be stored in our dial plan. When the child takes the book off the shelf, he/she will receive a call from the Storybook Reader, who will tell the reader what page he will be reading from. When the child is ready to hang up, Asterisk will store the caller ID and information of the chapter the child left off for the next time he/she takes the book off the shelf again. Other non-linear narratives could be used for content, such as \”Choose your own adventure\” books for an older audience.

Location Based Narrative
Stories are inherently tied to places. Things happen to people in
specific places. Streetstories offers the chance for pedestrians and
online users to experience what\’s happening on the streets of New York
City. Who said what and where?

Our goal with this is to extend the narrative of a physical space. By
allowing people to record their own stories and listen to others, a
physical space can take on a new life. We can also observe and learn
things we might not have noticed before through the eyes and ears of
someone else.

This interaction not only exists in the virtual space (via a yahoo maps
interface) - it exists in physical space (via cell phone or podcast).
With street stories, you\’re hearing new dialogue and interacting with
your environment through the cell phone.

Aura attempts to represent and convey the emotional context of a location through the analysis of simple forms of user generated information. It follows the path of an emotionally significant experience of a particular space in Manhattan from a visual representation in photographs to a vocal, recorded story and makes the accumulation of location related information available to others through a simple phone call or a text message from their mobile phone wherever they are. Aura also attempts to assist users in finding locations matching a particular desired aura and allows users to automate a phone message to a friend in order to convey useful information about their current location. Aura is also intended to have a physical representation in a public space and a virtual representation online so that the most recent and archived communications within Aura can be publically accessible.

By calling the number, leaving a voice message, and scheduling a time for the message to be delivered, you can let the owner of the telebunny know that you were thinking about them, and hope that they find some comfort in hearing your special message. Maybe you have a young child at home while you\’re away on business? Or a special sweetheart who you know will be coming home from work tired and late? When the time comes for the message to be delivered, the telebunny lights up, letting its owner know that there is a message waiting for her. Giving it a gentle squeeze will connect the call and relay the message in your own voice.