Category Archives: Thesis

Heather Greer, Pia Zaragoza, Projects, Thesis

White Box Communications

Pia Zaragoza

White Box Emergency Communications is a radio-based emergency communications system that is accessible, affordable, and easy to use that can be deployed when modern communication methods are down during a disaster.

www.pzaragoza.net/whitebox

Description

Modern communication methods rely heavily on cell phone towers and internet connections, which, during disasters are either offline or reserved for emergency response and disaster management. How can survivors communicate their location and get the supplies they need? White Box Emergency Communications aims to solve this problem by repurposing an existing protocol, automatic packet reporting system (APRS), developed by the amateur radio community for emergency communications. By making APRS more accessible, affordable, and easy to use, it allows responders to see status updates, view GPS coordinates, and communicate independently with survivors via this long-established wireless technology.

Classes

Thesis

Jorge Brake, Katherine Dillon, Projects, Thesis

Serendicity

Jorge Brake

A mobile application that encourages serendipitous exploration and discovery of city neighborhoods.

http://jabrake.github.io/serendicity

Description

Serendicity is an attempt to upend the normative travel experience. Travelers often have a specific destination in mind when they arrive to a new city. Rather than taking the fastest route there, why not explore a more interesting one? Leveraging open APIs and frameworks, the mobile app generates walking routes based on location, time, and preferences. The end result: less structure, more serendipity, and hopefully a different travel experience.

Classes

Thesis

Azure Tianran Qian 錢天然, Heather Greer, Marina Zurkow, Project Development Studio (Marina Zurkow), Projects, Shawn Van Every, Surveillance Documentary, Thesis

What’s your secret?

Azure Tianran Qian  錢天然

As an experimental of non-linear story telling, the project contains the documentary film in an interactive wooden box, which has the memory-ralated objects that assembled in a poetic way.

Description

“What’s Your Secret” is an augmented reality installation that shares the stories of elderly woman. In the installation, the audience is presented with boxes and mementos, each with a live portrait and objects of the subject.

The stories revealed in the box share life’s experiences – good and bad – give people a choice of hearing the different parts of the story over time.

Classes

Project Development Studio (Marina Zurkow), Surveillance Documentary, Thesis

Mack Howell, Nancy Hechinger, Projects, Thesis

Trajectory

Mack Howell

My thesis project, an app that livestreams video when the phone's sensors are highly activated

http://trajectory.camera

Description

Trajectory is an experiment to find out what a smartphone sees when traumatic events happen to it — e.g. it's dropped, it overheats, it encounters g-forces. Its own sensors trigger streaming video, live imagery, that's then uploaded to a website.

Classes

Thesis

Kathleen Wilson, Projects, Thesis, Youjin Shin

AQUA-BRIDGE

Youjin Shin

A web based smart data management platform for monitoring water quality and creating a crowd-sourced world water quality map

http://www.aqua-bridge.org/

Description

Tackling drinking water issues in developing countries with well filters has largely failed due to the limited field data on how successful the filters have been in reducing disease. Part of the problem has been ineffective communication between filter users in local villages and the project managers monitoring the filters. AQUA-BRIDGE will develop a streamlined system for logging water quality and the data visualization will be developed for project managers to use in data analysis and the public to view on the web. In addition, AQUA-BRIDGE offers the water quality kits so the public can also have the opportunities to test their own water. The aggregated data from the public will create the world water quality database and it will be shared through visualization in real-time.

Classes

Thesis

Heather Greer, Kang-Ting Peng, Projects, Thesis

CARDIO

Kang-Ting Peng

Quantify your heartbeat, Display it on the road

http://thesis.itp.io/students/ktp242

Description

“CARDIO” is a pulse detector on the steering wheel in your car to measure the driver's heartbeat. After receiving and quantifying the driver's heartbeat information, “CARDIO” sends the information to the LED strips mounted outside the car. By syncing the person and the machine, “CARDIO” makes the car a way to communicate on the road. “CARDIO” is a tool for quantifying the driver's emotions and assists other drivers in detecting situations such as road rage. In this way, “CARDIO” attempts to connect drivers and road users in a more personal visual way.

Classes

Thesis

Gabe Barcia-Colombo, Maria Paula Saba, Projects, Thesis

Jewliebots: open-source programmable jewelry

Maria Paula Saba

Jewliebots is a set of interactive jewelry that can be programmed through a graphical interface, with the goal of raising girls interest in Computer Science and Technology.

www.jewliebots.com

Description

Jewliebots is an open source library of wearables that allows users to customize their own electronic jewelry through a graphical programming interface. The goal is to engage and increase girls interest in the workings of technology by showing them that coding can be also beautiful.

Jewliebots are designed to be fashionable and attractive, gathering interest of girls from all ages. The hardware include LEDs, buttons and sensors that change aesthetics of the jewel according to the code uploaded. The jewel can be customized by generating algorithms through a block-programming style language. Circuits are embedded in 3D printed cases, baked polymer clay and laser-cut parts and it has been tested in bracelets, necklaces and phone cases.

Classes

Thesis

Gabe Barcia-Colombo, Projects, Sam Brenner, Thesis

Adventures of Teen Bloggers

Sam Brenner

Come face-to-face with the online identities of thousands of former teen bloggers. Choose a character from the annals of LiveJournal, an all-but-defunct blogging site, and lead them on the most epic of journeys: a walk down a high school hallway.

http://teenbloggers.net

Description

The Adventures of Teen Bloggers combines the aesthetic of old-school graphic adventure games with the vapid, self-obsessed musings of teenagers circa 2005. Players pick one of millions of LiveJournal users to re-animate and lead on a walk through a high school hallway. When asked to interact with another character, players discover the strengths (or weaknesses) of their character: they can only say things that the LiveJournal user actually said on their blog all those years ago. By dredging up a LiveJournal user's blog posts, once written under the semblance of privacy but now free of context and wholly public, I will draw attention to the permanence of our lives on the internet and question how we choose to share what we share online.

Classes

Thesis

Eric Rosenthal, Louise Foo, Projects, Thesis

Visual Sound Synthesis

Louise Foo

Visual Sound Synthesis is a series of image-sound explorations of the meeting between graphic design and a program that turns the iPhone camera into an optical synthesizer that plays what it sees.

http://visualsoundsynthesis.com

Description

With roots in research about historical optical sound devices like the ANS synthesizer, Oramics, Sound-On-Film techniques and the Pattern Playback Synthesizer I asked myself – how can I experience this image-sound translation myself today with the technology available to me? and how can I share this with others? Through a process of programming, interface prototype design, listening to images and looking at sounds and finally through collaboration with graphic designer Martha Skou – the final outcome is a series of 'scores' played back by the viewer with the camera in the iPhone. The installation of those 'scores' explore how in many ways the visual and audible senses are related, but not necessarily synchronized.

Classes

Thesis