Mike's Blog

Concept:

What makes a party great? Is it meeting new people or hanging out with old friends? Which is more rewarding and fun, living in the excitement of the party moment or recollecting them from the past? My project Whiskey Wands, Booze Batons attempts to answer these questions by quantifying the social interactions of party-goers while tracking their moods and experiences as a party progresses.

Construction:

Whiskey Wands, Booze Batons consists of a wireless electronic wand connected to a data-logging computer and website. These wands will collect “excitement” data from the party as they are passed amongst interacting party-goers. The data will be projected in real-time on to a wall in the party space. The data will also be posted on a website, to be recollected and revisited in the coming days, months, and years.

History:

This project took me two semester to complete. I designed the hardware during the first semester in a class called sociable objects.  The video below shows how the interaction worked. The majority of my time during the first semester was spent on getting the electronics up and running.

The following semester I took a Data Viz class. This gave me the opportunity to try new ways of visualizing the data that was captured by the wand. I also had sometime to make a new inclosure for the wand. The final wand design is seen at the top of the page.  Using the circuitry I design the previous semester, I modded a Early Times whiskey bottle to house all of the components. Early Times – nice bottle, terrible whiskey.

Above: Data visualization created showing one user’s interaction with the wand during a party. The time stamp shows each occasion that user 415 provided a sample throughout the night. The size of the solid colored circle as it crosses the time axis indicates the BAC level.  The small circle outlines show when other users provided sensor readings. Notice how the wand became most popular between 2:35 and 3:20.

Above: A more abstract visualization of one user’s interaction with the wand. This view is meant to be used as live data-viz during an event. As more users enter data, the visualization will be updated live, evolving and changing the design over time.

Technology:

The wand contains an arduino and BAC sensor for capturing the alcohol data. The keypad and LCD screen allow for users to enter their unique user IDs. The wand also contains an xBee, which allows the data to be sent wirelessly to a laptop computer. The laptop logs the sensor readings and generates the data visualization using processing.

Original breadboard prototype of the board.

First case enlosure: not party ready.

The sound stylus was one of the 6 devices I created for my thesis project Extending the Touchscreen: New Interfaces for Capacitance Touch Screens.  The stylus converts downward pressure on the stylus tip into a sound signal.  The sound signal travels though the headphone jack and is mapped to the size of the brush stroke.  The harder you press the tip to the screen, the larger the brush size.

The software above was created using openframeworks for iphone.  Much thanks to the oF development team!  The hardware was prototyped using arduino.

Internal component of the sound stylus:

Arduino Pro-Mini (top right)

Li-po Battery (below arduino)

Force Sensitive Resistor (below the Li-po battery).

On-off LED (top)

Microphone Reset Switch (top left)

On-off Switch (below reset switch)

Idea – I’ve been thinking about and exploring the idea of using 3d rapid prototyping techniques to create sculptural data visualizations.  One idea was to have elements or data of the sculpture represent the object itself.  I didn’t really have any great ideas for a particular data set and was having trouble explaining my idea to people.  I settled on mapping the frequency of each letter in the alphabet onto a key on the keyboard.  I used this chart from wikipedia for the frequency of each letter.

Here are the results -

Additional Photos -

Conclusions – This was just a first go at trying to create a data driven 3d sculpture.  I wound up scaling the keys a little bit too much in the vertical direction.  The weight of the tall keys caused the towers to tilt at an angle.  I plan on showing this prototype to a few people that will hopefully give me more ideas for new data sets to look at.  I want to try and use the CNC for future data driven sculptures.  I also want to try and include color into the sculpture somehow.

Click

Thought I would post an oldie but goodie. Thanks to Henry for the video. Along with the original prince poster, this too may have been lost forever.

Nearly everyday for 15 years I saw this poster in the doorway of a house in my neighborhood. It wasn’t until high school that I connected the picture with Prince’s music I had heard on the radio. Returning home from college breaks and trips abroad, it was nice to go back and see that not only was Prince still there, but that other tenants in the building had hung posters of iconic pop-stars in their doorways (Dolly Parton, Elvis, Michael Jackson). Unfortunately sometime in the past few years, the Prince poster disappeared. The neighborhood will never quite be the same.

This ode to the Prince poster was created in the spring of 2007. It was on display from our dorm-room window for all to see and appreciate 24 hours a day.

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Clients bring in all sorts of weird materials to get laser cut/etched at work.  Today someone brought in a steak (actually brisket) for us to etch.  The vector cut at the end of the video is pretty gross.  For better or for worse, it didn’t smell like BBQ afterwards.

I work part-time at NYU’s Advanced Media Studios running a 2-D laser-cutter and 3-D printer for rapid prototyping.  In addition to these services, AMS also does large format digital printing as well as negative scanning.  During some downtime over the summer, I designed an iPhone 4 case in Solidworks and then printed it on the 3-D printer.  I also made this short video to explain how RP services work at AMS.  Unfortunately the colors didn’t come out quite right, I should have run some more tests!

This week  for Personal Expression and Wearable Technology, we had to make something that “dealt with our senses.”  While I originally thought the assignment was to create something that “heightened our senses,” I think working with some constraints actually helped me with my concept.

Synesthesia is the idea that one type of sensory input can combine or trigger reactions within other senses.  For my project, I created a pair of goggles that would increase the wearer’s “spatial awareness” by way of forced synesthesia.  The goggles work by first obstructing the user’s vision with blocks of wood in the eyeholes.  Next, the feeler antennas translate any touch input into an eye gouge for the wearer.  The user is now much more spatially aware of the obstacles around them!