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Simulacra: Social Media Daring Game

This Daring Game is a 2 player experience that challenges users to complete dares of increasing difficulty in their social media accounts to invite people to reconsider their attachment to their online personas.

Maria Calderon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKZYv2R5aT8&feature=emb_title

Description

The Social Media Daring Game is a two-player experience that challenges users to complete dares of increasing difficulty in their social media accounts. By challenging people to do a series of dares, this experience invites them to reconsider their attachment to their online personas and also have a sense of how these have the potential to unconsciously frame their perception of themselves. The experience starts with players being asked to submit which social media platforms they use in order to give each user dares that correspond with these. Once the game starts, players are then challenged to fulfill three rounds of dares, starting in the first round with low-risk dares which then increase in difficulty each round. Along with trying to complete three dares under a set amount of time, users also have the choice to swap dares with each other or give up. At the end, players are given a reward depending on the number of dares they complete. Initially, the reward was meant to be a series of stickers with the phrase “I share, therefore I am”, which for me encompasses the sheer influence that social media has had in our society.

IM Abu Dhabi
IM-UH.4001
Capstone Project (Abu Dhabi)
Play/Games
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Simulacra: Infinite Scroll

Infinite Scroll is an interactive installation that seeks to address mindless scrolling in social media by extending the feed outside of the phone and into user's physical surroundings, ultimately bringing them to question how much of what they scrolled through they actually remember.

Maria Calderon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwcnEoWgNUw&feature=emb_title

Description

With social media platforms’ infinite scroll capabilities, most people have become desensitized to the sheer amount of information and emotions they are exposed to in their online feeds, quickly scrolling or swiping past content that does not instantly draw their attention.

Infinite Scroll is an interactive installation that seeks to address this mindless scrolling by extending the feed outside of the phone, allowing users to see all the content they have scrolled through. This experience prompts users to scroll on a phone as they would normally do, yet as it is done, keeps the scrolled feed visible as a projection that flows out of the phone, engulfing the wall. Face to face with all the content they glanced at, users are encouraged to question how much of it they actually retained, and to reflect on what this means as it becomes increasingly easy to disregard content in social media feeds.

IM Abu Dhabi
IM-UH.4001
Capstone Project (Abu Dhabi)
Art
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Plastic Ocean

Plastic Ocean is a game which represents how both conscious and unconscious actions and habits of human beings lead to ocean pollution.

Tiger Tian, Luize Rieksta, Nhi Pham Le Yen

https://vimeo.com/419260901

Description

“Plastic Ocean” is a game which tells a story about ocean plastic pollution and how humans contribute to it. Although originally “Plastic Ocean” was meant as a VR experience, alterations had to be made because of the current situation. There are two scenes in the game. In the first scene, the user finds themselves in a common multi story building living room. There are plastic containers scattered around the room and the player can interact with these plastic containers around – pick them up and drop them. The player then finds a television and clicking it triggers a video to play. After watching a short clip about ocean pollution, the user teleports to an underwater world. At first it is pristine and clean and many sea creatures are swimming around. The user follows a guided path by seaweeds and overtime notice plastic containers from the first scene appearing around them in the ocean. Eventually all sea creatures disappear and plastic takes over the ocean. After making a loop around the ocean it is possible to teleport back to the first scene in the living room to reflect back on the actions taken in the first scene.

IM Abu Dhabi
IM-UH.3311
Alternate Realities
VR\\\\\\\\AR
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Deliberate Negligence

This project explores the strategic positioning of suicide barriers in the NYUAD campus.

Luize Rieksta, Maria Calderon, Will Mlekush

https://vimeo.com/419241270

Description

For this piece, we drew inspiration from Alex Villar’s “Temporary Occupations”, which shows how the infrastructure and architecture of a space enforce movement and determine spatial codes. We decided to adapt Villar’s concept to our campus and its infrastructure, more specifically – the suicide barriers that NYUAD implemented after the transition to the Saadiyat campus. This adaptation focuses Villar’s concept on the social issue of suicide. Positioning ourselves in the vulnerable spaces between these barriers, we interrogate such responsive spatial interventions, asking questions of purpose, effectiveness, and agency. 

Why place suicide barriers in some areas and not others? There are notable gaps near the Torch Club and around various sets of stairs on campus. There are also gaps on the high walls behind the Campus Center, an area of low pedestrian traffic. Surveillance cameras were also placed around most of the non-barred areas. What benefit comes from these cameras’ placement? How do these barriers contribute to dealing with suicide? What constitutes an effective intervention? How does the presence of these barriers affect the behaviors of residents and visitors?

IM Abu Dhabi
IM-UH.1013
Understanding Interactive Media – Critical Questions & Theories
Performance,Art
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Climate Glitch

“Climate Glitch” is a photography series representing the climate change in three different locations.

Jana Pocuchova, Luize Rieksta, Amy Kang

https://vimeo.com/418923239

Description

“Climate Glitch” displays three series of glitched photos, in which each series depicts different natural environments—in Latvia, Slovakia, and South Korea—that are being destroyed by human society.

Each photo for the different locations is glitched twice using a sound software Audacity. The first glitch is done through an effect called “delay” and the second through “reverse”. “Delay” refers to how people delay taking action to preserve the environment and “reverse” signifies people’s attempt to reverse back the harm they have done to it. The first glitch of “delay” inevitably damages/distorts the environment, and the second glitch, or the attempt to “reverse” it, makes it worse. With this depiction of the glitched photos, we hope to alarm the audience about the destruction that humans bring to nature, often regardless of whether it is intended to harm or help the environment, if done perfunctorily.

We represented climate change-related topics from our home environments: deforestation in Slovakia, temperature rise in Latvia and pollution from tourism in Korea. However, our glitch algorithm is not just applicable to one image. The fact it can be repeated on any image is an extension of the algorithm itself, which connects to the point that climate change is a topic concerning everyone.

IM Abu Dhabi
IM-UH.1013
Understanding Interactive Media – Critical Questions & Theories
Art
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Communications lab projects

Project done for communications lab

Max Blinov

https://mab1312.nyuadim.com

Description

1. 30MFF (30 minute film festival). We were supposed to do a video of our choice within 30 minutes

2. Comic. A comic about the pandemic (where it all began)

3. Audio project. Here we were supposed to implement a website that includes user interaction and sound.

4. Video project (TBD)

IM Abu Dhabi
IM-UH.1011
Communications Lab
Sound,Art
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PandemicSim

A simulation demonstrating the benefits of social distancing during a pandemic

d

https://youtu.be/YQt4y0cIees

Description

My project consists of 100 little balls on a screen, plus a user interface. One of those balls is “infected”, the other 99 are “healthy”. Each ball moves in a random direction but fixed velocity. An infected ball can recover after a certain number of seconds. When a healthy ball bumps into an infected one, it becomes infected. As can be expected, the “infection” spreads exponentially.

What excites me about this project is that the concept is quite simple, but it produces delightful and interesting results out of a system that is too complex to orchestrate yourself sequentially. You could never tell those 100 balls what to do every frame. Instead, you tell them how to behave, and then watch the magic happen. Maybe the “infected ball” won't touch any others, and it'll end right there when it “recovers”. Maybe they'll all become infected. Maybe half will. Most of the time, however, you'll see a logistic curve in the cumulative number of infections, mirroring what happens in real life.

The project is meant to visually demonstrate the benefits of social distancing in a post-Covid-19 world. It was inspired by an article from the Washington Post that showed a very similar model, except without the ability to change the settings of the simulation. I wanted to create something visually pleasing and modern looking that would embody the reasoning behind social distancing as a way of slowing the spread of the virus.

I added the ability to change the population size and death rate to make the simulator representative of pandemics in general. The default setting is at the estimated Covid-19 death rate of 2%. I also added an automatic peak finder that would show in the graph where the peak of the simulation outbreak occurred. This helps demonstrate the stark difference between the social distancing and business as usual models.

IM Abu Dhabi
IM-UH.1010
Introduction to Interactive Media
Art,Play/Games
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Boxing with Aries

Boxing with Aries is an immersive experience in Unity that invites players to a dark and eerie world where they will have to navigate through their internal conflict of peace and war, of hope and sorrow.

Nhi Pham Le Yen, Neyva Hernandez, Vince Nguyen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zgEZgupZCw

Description

Boxing with Aries welcomes the player with an inviting big red punching bag placed in the center of a gloom, obscure, and desolate ground that is actively contrast by a sky filled with grids of smaller punching bags seemingly blending with bloody clouds streaks: what could go wrong, what other ominous thing that could happen here?

Unknowingly to the players, dozens of doves fly out from the punching bag whenever it is punched. That is simply not how punching a bag works in real life. The act of punching something is supposed to be a violent act: how could this make sense with such a symbol of peace, how could such two antipodes co-exist in the same world, let alone in the same interaction. Taken back by the unexpected interactions, the players then face their internal struggle of interpreting such encounters: whether to keep punching or to stop the violent act, whether to spread peace by setting the doves free or to let hope die out by chasing the doves away…

The project comprised of five main components:
– The player, a.k.a the boxer (with colliders and animation scripts)
– The big punching bag (with colliders and scripts to generate doves)
– The doves and their associated animation (random speed, random direction…)
– The grid of smaller punching bags
– The environment (diffused ground, red streaks of clouds, and particle system volumetric fog)

IM Abu Dhabi
IM-UH.3311
Alternate Realities
VR/AR
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Interactive Turntable

Emulating a vinyl record player on Processing.

Amy Kang

https://youtu.be/NKcG2H6h-8A

Description

“Interactive Turntable” is an emulation of a vinyl record player (turntable) on Processing. The user can use the turntable just as they would use it in real life, which is by placing the tonearm on the LP record. The tonearm moves closer to the center of the record as the playing continues. The user can change the start time of the music by moving the tonearm to different parts of the LP record and can stop the music by removing the tonearm from it. The turntable also contains a volume slider that can be used to adjust the sound volume.
Two soundtracks, namely “Moon River” sung by Audrey Hepburn and “Symphony No.5” composed by Beethoven, are available. Either song can be chosen by clicking on the according buttons.

IM Abu Dhabi
IM-UH.1010
Introduction to Interactive Media
Music
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[A]PART

In the midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic, two NYU Abu Dhabi students aurally document their lives, being 8,656 km and 7 hours apart from each other—with one in Cairo, Egypt, and the other in Jeju, Korea.

Logaine Elshafie, Amy Kang

https://youtu.be/DmE2L6n74MY

Description

“[A]PART” is an aural documentation of our (Amy's and Logaine's) two different lives during the COVID-19 Pandemic, which made us return back home to Korea and Egypt in the middle of the Spring 2020 semester at New York University Abu Dhabi. Being approximately 8,656 km and 7 hours away from each other, we hoped to illustrate how different our day-to-day lives are, even in terms of what we hear, which many of us don’t usually think about. However, we also wanted to emphasize that despite being physically apart from each other, we are still a part of the NYU Abu Dhabi community and can keep in contact via the internet. The user can listen to the recorded sounds by hovering over each photo while scrolling down the one-page website.

IM Abu Dhabi
IM-UH.1011
Communications Lab
Sound,Narrative/Storytelling