NYC Live

Emmanuel Y Klein

An active map which tracks the Subway lines in manhattan.

Description

We, humans, process information, much more efficiently through images than text. When was the last time you pulled out your phone and entered directions just to find when the next train was coming? Isn't that information that you could find useful? This live “Marauders Map” of transportation in Manhattan will make receiving and absorb the information you want easier and more intuitive.

The map uses both the Google API and the MTAs API to create real-time tracking of select subway lines in Manhattan and then placing them in space.

Classes

Always On, Always Connected

EnergyViz

Mathura Govindarajan, Viniyata Pany

An installation that simplifies the concept of energy through a heat map of the energy usage on the ITP floor

https://mathuramg.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/energyviz-wip/

Description

Our aim through this project is to make the community aware of, and reflect on their energy usage. While we present only the data on the ITP floor, we will make the visualizations help the general community associate the numbers with daily facts and figures.

The project will involve installing an interactive screen that gives passers-by an easy-to-understand overview of the real time energy use of the floor, while providing the ability for the curious to examine the moment-by-moment data in more detail. This installation will visualize and gamify energy usage in the building through fun comparisons and contrasts of energy usage. Users will be able to look at and analyze the energy usage from any time in the past year up until the present moment.

The realtime energy data will be procured through the enertiv energy monitoring system. The visualization will be presented to users on touch screens along with a physical dial to set the time range.

Project Blog:
https://mathuramg.wordpress.com/2016/04/21/energy-updates-the-server-is-up/

Finals time!

Classes

Energy, Web Development with Open Data

The Collective Emotions of Emily Dickinson

Dana Abrassart, Leslie E Ruckman

If an artificial emotional intelligence ever exists, will it be able to understand the most nuanced forms of human expression, such as the poem? <br />

http://armchair.guru/work#/emily-dickinson-emotions/

Description

Can an artificial emotional intelligence ever exist? How well will computers be able to appreciate and interpret human emotion?

“Discover, understand and revise language tones in text.” This is the selling point forIBM’s Tone Analyzer Beta built off of Watson.

Inspired by the recent release of the Watson Tone Analyzer, Leslie Ruckman and I decided to see what would happen if we tried to analyze the deeper human emotions conveyed through poetry with these newly minted tools. We decided to go with a familiar poet whose work was prolific enough to be counted as a data set, and popular enough to be fully digitized. We landed on Emily Dickinson.

We decided to start with her top 5 most popular poems assuming that they contained some magic that resonates with a largest number of people.

We then ran the text of these poems through Tone Analysis to discover emotional metrics such as: emotional summary, language style summary, and social summary.

Classes

Data Art

Zombie Self Awareness Tool Kit

Samuel Sadtler

The best way to bring yourself to awareness and subvert the current apocalypse.

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyFxrQd7-zw&index=2&list=PLp1AzLEITCFxnF3zXRn5ZErynB5Vg5Ynr

Description

Exploring ways to reflect on our relationships with our phones and ask the question. What can life be? Featured projects include: Shakie: the best selfie app for blurry photos, Chance of Rainbows app: Whats better than checking the weather? Rainbows!, Post Texts: for sending physical text messages, Crete: the worlds first connected brink for disconnecting but still getting notifications so you can sleep at night, and Zombie Crossing: a simple update to dated civic infrastructure.

Classes

Readymades, Thesis

Breathe In

Michael Weber

"Breathe In" is an interactive story in virtual reality, telling the tale of a young man who learns to breathe underwater. As part of my ITP thesis, I explored how to tell a compelling story in VR that could elicit emotions powerful enough to bring back into the real world.

http://itp.nyu.edu/thesis/thesis2016/mhw322/

Description

“Breathe In” takes the principles of storytelling and adapts them to VR, exploring whether narnrative’s ability to create emotional response can be magnified through a more immersive medium. Personal experience generates the strongest emotions, and VR may possess the power to tell stories that offer something closer to personal experience.

The story centers around Alex, a new father grappling with boredom. When he learns he can breathe underwater, he begins secretly escaping into an underwater world for longer and longer. On the night of his daughter’s first birthday, he makes a choice with tragic consequences.

My goal is for viewers to feel as if they themselves experienced Alex’s story, and to interpret and internalize his fate.

Classes

Thesis

Future Waterfront

Crystal Brusch

Sea levels will rise more than six feet in the next hundred years. This project uses augmented reality to visualize climate change and lets you plan ahead for a glorious waterfront home. Will what you see inspire you to change the future?

https://itp.nyu.edu/thesis2016/project/crystal-brusch

Description

Sea levels will rise more than six feet in the next hundred years and South Florida is especially at risk. The region is a canary for the United States, but the area’s plans to survive climate change are out of touch. Miami Beach recently started to raise roadways, but a two-foot boost in height will not keep the roads dry through the century. This project aims to get people to think long-term and start a hard dialogue between residents and politicians. The first part engages residents through a satirical mortgage application while educating them about the spatial and temporal threats from sea level rise. The second part encourages residents to visually map future flooding with augmented reality and demand infrastructure that prevents or lessens flooding.

Classes

Social Hacking: Appropriating Interaction Technologies, Social Hacking: Appropriating Interaction Technologies, Thesis

Food Systems – Interventions & Remediations

Francesca Rodriguez Sawaya, Michelle Hessel, Nikita Huggins

A curated exhibition of projects representing the final work from students in the Spring 2016 section of Food Systems.

Description

A short documentary about food waste in which 2 ITP students try to understand why we waste so much food; A campaign aimed at working with Brooklyn farmers and restaurants to save “ugly” food produce , a soil analysis made with Arduino that talks about the importance of composting. Our goal is to educate people about food, especially about food waste. With these projects, we want to not only create awareness about the topic but also to discuss the possible solutions to it and what we can do on our daily basis. This exhibition should stand next to the project “Trash Talk”, submitted by Dana Abrassart.

Classes

Food Systems: Interventions + Remediations

Crispicotura

Thea Rae

I’ve created mechanical creatures that wiggle, wobble, and sway. They are a new species that evolved in our tech-saturated and sedentary world. These creatures are my attempt to help machines experience a state of ease and playfulness, and to inspire whimsy in those around them.

http://thea-rae.tumblr.com/tagged/thesis

Description

These creatures have currently evolved into three different species–Juleractis, Maratuglans, and Aureiladilldium–each with its own anatomy. Their presence and emotional qualities are directly related to their form and method of actuation . They all drink the life juice of electricity, but each metabolizes it in different ways: magnetic fields, vibration, oscillating motors, the push and pull of springs. With each evolution they grow into more complex organisms capable of new varieties of wiggles. And like most creatures, they grow old and weary with time until eventually their joints weaken, leaving their still, skeletal structures behind.

Classes

Thesis

p5.playground

Yining Shi

p5.playground is an interactive debug tool for p5js which allows people to manipulate shapes on canvas in real time and visually understand a lot of the math that goes behind drawing stuff on canvas. This tool exists as a live coding p5 editor.

http://1023.io/p5-inspector/

Description

Designers or people who are familiar with graphic user interfaces think about lines and locations differently from mathematicians and programmers. From example, How do people draw a curve?

Designers are really good at using tools like Illustrator. It has a lot of nifty interface features to draw like – rulers, guides, grid system, and we can also manipulate shapes (move, resize, rotate them) on the canvas in real time.

On the other hand, with many code-based drawing tools, like p5 or processing, we usually start with, estimating of the coordinate system in our brain, and then guess our way out of the initial x, y position to draw something. After executing the program we see how close we get and we probably need to edit the code again. All this seems fine as long as we have a basic knowledge of the coordinate system and are experienced with code-based drawing tools. But people who are beginners often find this process overwhelming and adding frame based animations to such drawings becomes even more complicated.

However, using computation to make art is much more powerful in terms of how complex and dense a digital piece of art can be made. So I felt like there should be a way to have a WYSIWYG tool that allows us to code faster, better by helping us understand the code visually.

With p5.playground, when the playground mode is turned on, people can –
1. See rulers and guidelines on the canvas, and shows objects’ and mouse’s x, y position in real time.
2. Manipulate the shapes on the canvas in real time and see the code updated immediately.
In addition, the web-based editor is also a live coding environment that allows people to see the outcome of their code in real time; which can shorten and enhance the programming progress.

Classes

Hacking the Browser, Thesis