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.