Experience my dreams in VR
My thesis is called Awaken. It is an experimental art project where I recreated my personal dream experiences for others to experience in a Gear VR headset.
It is a dream sequence that is around 8.5 mins long. From opening to ending, with four dreams, and various transitions. The user will wear a headphone, and hopefully get to sit in a comfortable arm chair.
Thesis
Potato Glasses are a wearable device designed to ease anxiety during public speaking. Biosensor feedback triggers the device, which shows humorous visualizations. While a set of digital eyes maintain visual connection with the audience.
Social behavior is a very important part in our daily lives. For example, conversation connects us with others. In ITP, two areas I'm interested in are helping people to create better social interactions and visualizing people's personal data. I'm interested in these topics because I'd like to know how conversations shape ourselves and affect the audience.
Potato Glasses is a headset worn by a speaker, which contains a mobile phone, microcontroller, and two battery-operated OLED screens. It’s connected to a pulse sensor, which collects heart rate data. A high pulse, associated with nervousness, activates the device.
Inside the headset, an augmented reality application detects the audience’s faces and replaces them with potatoes. It also displays the scripted presentation. The exterior OLED screens show a pair of digital eyes that reflect the users.
The device enhances the speaker’s and audience’s experience – the speaker is able to ease their communication anxiety by avoiding direct eye contact and focusing on their script. And the audience gets a better presentation.
Thesis
CropTXT is a network of sensors that aims to help farmers conserve water and at the same time, make farming more convenient.
Rice yield potential has been slowly decreasing in the Philippines and other neighboring Southeast Asian countries in recent years due to climate change. The decline in yield is mainly attributable to the El Nino phenomenon, a drought affecting arable land for a minimum of 3 months, making water for agriculture increasingly scarce.
Rice culture requires a tremendous amount of water compared to other crops. According to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), it takes an average 5,000 liters of water to produce 1 kg of rice. It is estimated that by 2025, 15-20 million hectares of irrigated rice will suffer from some degree of water scarcity that will result in rice shortage all over South-East Asia. This shortage is a big issue for the Philippines and other neighboring developing countries that depend on rice – as a food staple, a source of income, or both.
CropTXT is a network of sensors that aims to help farmers conserve water and at the same time, make farming more convenient.
First, the farmer sticks wireless, GSM-based sensors on the ground. From there, the sensors analyze soil conditions and the amount of water the crops need. After irrigation, the water level will gradually decrease. When the water level has dropped to 15 cm below the soil surface, CropTXT will alert the farmer to re-flood the field. Once re-flooding of 5 cm is reached, CropTXT will again send another SMS to alert the farmer to stop irrigating.
According to IRRI, allowing the water in the field to drop 15 cm below the surface before irrigating again is called “Safe Alternate Wetting-Drying (Safe AWD).” The process of Safe AWD that CropTXT simulates will not cause any yield decline since the roots of the rice plants will be able to take in water from the saturated soil, and at the same time, resulting in 25% water savings.
Thesis
Aware chair is an interactive object about the human sitting posture. A majority of people spend a large part of their time sitting on a chair. But we forget our sitting posture. The project helps people to aware their posture with humorous way.
http://chanwookmin.com/portfolio/aware-chair/
In the modern society, a majority of people spend a large part of their time sitting on a chair. However, they always forget their bad sitting posture. However, it causes serious problems. How can we be aware of our bad sitting posture with humorous way?
Aware chair helps people be aware of their bad sitting posture. It visualizes their posture with screen and mouse pointer and bothers them to use a computer when they are sitting with bad sitting posture. Another way is the project push people fall down. This way of being aware of sitting posture make people laugh or annoy. This can be a better way to be aware of them than traditional information visualization.
Thesis
Liminal Space explores the creation of a temporary environment through collective motion, lights and sounds, transporting participants from their everyday reality to a meaningful shared experience.
https://itp.nyu.edu/thesis2016/project/sergio-mora-diaz
In rituals and sacred experiences, liminality refers to a threshold of consciousness, the boundary between ordinary and alternate reality. It’s that place where our non-rational, imaginative, open-hearted self takes over.
Liminal Space seeks to create an experience that sacralizes space, time and the connection among people through their active participation. It is composed of an arrangement of vertical translucent fabrics, dynamic lights and sounds that react to people’s gestures using their mobile phones.
The device we carry in our pocket acquires a new meaning throughout the experience. It allows people to interact with the dynamic environment and with one another, improvising a ritual that creates, for a moment, an imaginary shared world.
Live Web, Thesis
Shake your memories from your mobile phone into the Pensieve!
Pensieve is a concept from Harry Potter, where wizards could pull their memories out of their head, put it into the Pensieve and look at it from a third-person perspective. In our non-magic, muggles’ world, I want to recreate this experience with the mobile phone as our wand. An app will read the photos on the phone and project a list of places the user has been to. The user could choose a place and shake the photo into the Pensieve!
Thesis
What role can VR play in emerging audiovisual art? Additionally, what does VR have to offer as a new interface for creation?
http://sethkranzler.com/resound
Resound is a multichannel audiovisual environment for both creation and experience. Resound allows the user to compose sound in three dimensional space using hand controllers and gesture, generating a visual score that is part of his or her experience. Instead of using a classical channel-based approach to sound design, Resound uses a powerful sound-object methodology to assign sound behaviors to objects in virtual reality. By treating a virtual environment as both an experience and working tool, Resound creates an enchanted world to compose 3D music in, engaging the viewer through more aesthetic and immersive tools.
Thesis
Passtime creates a space along the bottom of your browser for interactive avatars so close friends can hangout and share content and conversations in realtime and stay connected in a more natural and fun way.
Passtime gives life to your friends online with avatars you can control and customize in your web browser. Passtime introduces a new dynamic of sharing, live sharing. Experience videos, songs and articles in realtime with your friends to connect in new ways. It's as if they're sitting near you on their own computers. Your friends are always with you without being obtrusive or in the way.
Thesis
fragment and entity” is an immersive VR experience about a memory which describes a certain state of mind of when you try to recall reminiscences but eventually breaks it into thousands of fragments
https://itp.nyu.edu/thesis2016/project/sehyun-kim
Fragment and Entity is an experiential VR narrative that takes the user on a visual and auditory journey. The user is immersed in an attempt to reconcile the fragments of a distorted and broken memory. VR and the subconscious share the realm of a constructed reality. A transition through several scenes provides the user with different perspectives from which to draw their own conclusions. Intentionally starving the user of literal references, the abstract world serves to visualize those memories that lie just beyond the horizon, represented only by abstract shapes and geometry. Rich visuals are combined with enchanting music and thought-provoking narration, all of which serve to highlight the chaos and tranquility of the subconscious.
Thesis
Parsing our Silent Language is a computer program that parses body language in real time utilizing machine learning and skeletal tracking.
https://itp.nyu.edu/thesis2016/project/kat-sullivan
Parsing the Silent Language is software that analyzes nonverbal language using a Kinect and the C++ framework, Cinder. Coming from a movement background, I was curious why sentiment analysis placed all emphasis on our words when our body language can contradict or add depth to our words. I started this process by first manually, and then algorithmically, categorizing my own body language. However, I was inadvertently programming my own movement tendencies and as a result, the algorithms became biased to my own body. To address the issue, I enlisted the help of several graduate acting students and recorded their skeletal data while they acted out various emotions. I then used this data to train a classifier using machine learning, which now analyzes body language in real time.
Thesis
