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Alone With My Phone

Denny George

Alone With My Phone is a first-person narrative story in which the user participates with their smartphone. It is a story about loneliness that uses sensory input like location and speech as plot devices to take the user through a journey of self-reflection with humor to help express some universal truths and remind users that they are not alone.

https://itp.nyu.edu/thesis2016/project/denny-george

Description

The central premise of my story is how a communication device's inability to help the protagonist communicate effectively leads to their growing sense of loneliness. The promise of internet and smartphones is that they are meant to bring people together but ever so often they are used as an excuse to avoid acknowledging each other in public. In the story, the app makes the user participate in a series of tasks trying to connect him/her with other people but inevitably fail. My project tries to tap into common smartphone behaviors of people to facilitate a direct encounter with loneliness rather than distracting them from it. The overall tone of the story is humorous and I hope it highlights the absurdities of technology aided communication.

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Resound

Seth Kranzler

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

Description

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.

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Fragment and Entity

Sehyun Kim

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

Description

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.

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Nowhere, Somwhere

Regina Vetka

“Nowhere, Somewhere” is an immersive experience that brings the user on a journey into the illusion of being nowhere, in the middle of somewhere.

http://www.angelaitp.com/2016/05/02/nowheresomewhere/

Description

Space is finite. We live in cities, enter buildings, apartments, and rooms going evermore into smaller and smaller spaces progressively into more and more synthetic ordered spaces. What if you went in, but entered into something expansive and natural? “Nowhere, Somewhere” aims to be an immersive outdoor space, indoors, that takes the user on a journey to the middle of nowhere, in the middle of somewhere. Enter, explore, interact, be nowhere, somewhere.

Enter Nowhere, Somewhere by crawling through a small space on the floor and entering an infinite space in the middle of a forest. Experience 24 hours of time in a vast forest in 1 minute and a half, without ever leaving 5×5 feet of a building in the middle of Manhattan. You can disappear to nowhere, in the vast expanse of somewhere.

This is accomplished through back projecting onto a standing shower tent, using two projectors, Isadora software, immersive sound and projection mapping. This project creates the illusion of being in a place of infinite space for a long period of time, when in reality they are in a confined area for a brief passing moment.

Classes

Nothing: Creating Illusions

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Parsing our Silent Language

Kat Sullivan

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

Description

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.

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Surface Patterns

Koen Holtkamp

What can we see through touch and feel through light?

http://itp.nyu.edu/thesis/thesis2016/kh2212/

Description

’Surface Patterns’ is an installation that alters our perception of space by activating subtle subconscious sensations through haptic stimulation to move the audience gradually through a range of states. It consists of a square white two tiered platform. As the individual stands on the platform the system comes alive. A series of precomposed stereo vibrations begin to sound from below their feet and two rings of white light emanate around them as sympathetic resonance to reinforce the movement of the vibrations. Beginning from a place of quiet contemplation the waves move slowly towards more intense interference patterns transferring the kinetic energy up through the body to create a dynamic sense of movement and directly affect a person’s consciousness.

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Ruby's Pets

Constantine Koumoussis

Ruby's Pets is a mobile application that teaches logic to kids of ages 5-7 years old.

Description

This is the project I worked on for my thesis. My objective was to teach kids the basic logic operators (and, or, not) through a game. The theme of Ruby's Pets is a petstore, which is owned by a red parrot called Ruby. The objective of the game is for the user to help Ruby assist the customers. Ruby asks questions that have to do with logic,and the user has to get them right.

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Sanctuary

Yurika Mulase

Sanctuary is the world I imagine when I play the piano–a fantasy forest that grows around me and my music. In this virtual world, I can create an intimate and secluded stage where I can overcome my anxiety by minimizing my awareness of the audience.

http://www.yurikamulase.com/sanctuary/

Description

Sanctuary is a shared virtual reality experience for me and a small audience. As a self-conscious piano player, I have never been able to share my personal compositions with others. My imaginary oasis throughout my piano career has been a magical forest where plants and trees grow and bloom with my music. Sanctuary is a representation of this world in VR with animated, child-like, whimsical greenery that emerges along with the musical notes as they are played. Audience members are invited to join me in my virtual forest and indulge in a private world-building session driven by my piano playing. They are represented as glowing orbs in the virtual world, like spirits wandering around a fantasy landscape.

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Méroir

Jordan Frand, Nicole He, Paula Ceballos Delgado

Méroir is not an average mirror. It plays with aspects of life that the we take for granted: reality, time, and the sense of self.

http://www.itp.paulaceballos.com/progress-report-meroir/

Description

Méroir is a mirror that isn't a mirror. Coming from a combination of the French “mé-” (equivalent to the prefix “un-“) and miroir (“mirror”), méroir is an “unmirror” that makes you take a closer look and think twice about time, reality and your sense of self. Part of our inspiration for this project came from the work of Robert Irwin, whose art plays subtly with the limits of human perception. Méroir's effect is achieved using a two way mirrored acrylic, HD monitor, two hidden cameras, sound, and the video effect software Isadora. The lights around the mirror just burned out today, but the rest of it is working perfectly.

Classes

Nothing: Creating Illusions

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Adeus

Joao Costa

How can I recapitulate the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in a sound installation within the context of contemporary art movements?

http://itp.nyu.edu/thesis/thesis2016/jmc1148/

Description

The project is a physical sound installation. The piece consists of two metal plates (one brass; one copper) containing musical notation represented by etched dashes. The song is “Valsa de Eurídice” (Eurydice’s Waltz) by Brazilian poet and musician Vinicius de Moraes.
The metal plates are“scanned” by an array of sensors that are attached to two linear actuators, one for each plate. When the system is triggered, both groups of sensors start moving along the plates in sync and play the song. Having reached the end of the plates, the sensors will move backwards and start again. However, since the system is assembled by a human, the array of sensors will slowly begin to move out of sync, altering the overall sound that is played – the assembly is not perfect, mirroring the flaws and entropy inherent to human nature.

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Thesis