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Heather Greer

What’s your secret?

Tianran Qian

“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.

Description

Have you ever been touched by a beautiful smile of an older woman? It is the smiles that draws me in, making me curious about their life stories. What is it that they know that I don’t about life? What lessons can they share?
Since we live in such a busy time, can we get some wisdom from someone growing old gracefully?

My hope is that other women in similar life circumstances – young but starting to have to make adult decisions, living in cities, with the world seemingly ahead of us – can learn something from them.

The stories revealed in "What's Your Secret", share life's experiences – good and bad – and give people a choice of hearing the different parts of the story over time.

Heather Greer

Decode Delhi

Tarana Gupta

Decode Delhi is a crowd-sourced social platform to quantify the city of Delhi. The goal is to develop a digital assistant that can help a person navigate and discover various aspects of the city while traveling safely from one point to another.

http://taranagupta.com/#/decode-delhi/

Description

Security is supposed to come from government agencies but in countries like India, with large and crowded cities like Delhi, it is hard to ensure safety.

With the growth of Internet and access to smartphones, opportunities have arisen to harness collective efforts of citizens who can improve quality of life in cities by simply disseminating the information they already have.

Through crowdsourced data, Decode Delhi makes an attempt to improve the experience of living in Delhi – the political and cultural capital of India- especially for girls and women. It covers three major aspects of navigation: safety level of different neighborhoods, knowledge of interesting places and street smart tips from fellow Delhiiets.

Kathy Wilson

It’s Alive

Talya Stein Rochlin

My project is a series of interactive kinetic sculptures, a family of creatures. Each sculpture corresponds to a specific sense. A fun, crazy exhibit where the viewer becomes a part of the art, interacting with the creatures, bringing them to life.

Description

My creatures are "alive". They are asleep when you first walk into the exhibit, and come to life as they are approached.
The series is built of five models, Each of the five basic senses are represented as individual creatures.
Touch was made into a kinetic sculpture out of tentacles. Smooth organic motion activated by touch, touching the users.
I began to sculpt when I was 3 and find it very dissatisfying not to be allowed to touch a sculpture. It's half of the experience. My thesis is my personal attempt to break the rules of the traditional museum, where you have to be quiet, and just observe the art. I want the viewers to leave my exhibit with smiles on their faces, feeling like they were engaged deeply with the art.

Heather Greer

From The Dark

Surya Mattu

Anonymous data is a myth. From The Dark is a project that offers insight into the hidden mechanisms & power struggles within our current communications infrastructure. It brings to light the data we generate with our smart devices & what it reveals.

Description

Edward Snowden's NSA document leaks in 2013 ignited the public conversation around a national and global surveillance culture, verifying much of what security professionals have been saying for the past two decades. Corporations and governments have access to a previously unprecedented amount of personal data. I investigated how this data is accumulated, how it's used, and how we can better understand our current technological environment. There is inherent value in making these processes more transparent, as a way to inform people's choices and help them engage in this conversation.

Katherine Dillon

Tiya

Su Hyun Kim

Tiya is my experimentation towards finding physical manifestation of the emoji language usually seen only on screens. It's a mobile app paired with robotic ears that are programmed to deliver physical interaction when somebody sends you a message.

http://www.mytiya.com

Description

Tiya, the messenger, works hard to deliver emotions between you and your close ones. Tiya utilizes graphic expression in conjunction with physical expression. My goal is to create a different interface other than verbal to find out if we can communicate emotions effectively. I was influenced by the common use of emoticons over social media. Tiya is a mobile app that comes with built-in robotic ears with a messaging mobile app. Once you open the application, your smart phone becomes this creature, Tiya. You can pet it or give different kind of gesture to communicate with the other person who is using this app. Tiya will become a shared pet between two users and start to develop a relationship with people who are taking care of her.

Heather Greer

TACTUS

Steve Cordova

Tactus is a wearable device that gives the user the ability to identify, feel, and touch color.

Description

Tactus is a wearable device worn on the wrist that interprets color and sends the user a tactile response. Think of it as braille for color. Using either a smartphone or the embedded sensors on the device, color values are translated to a electromagnetic wave that creates a sensation on the users finger. The device can be used by both visually impaired people and those looking to augment their own senses. It creates a new sensory modality for the user and more importantly the ability to not only see art, but feel it.

Gabe Barcia-Colombo

Whale

Sonia Li

Interactive multichannel sound installation strongly rooted in humanity. An environment where one experiences oneself, heavily influenced by the user’s own psychology. User lays in darkness, experiences bodily vibrations and immersive sound field.

Description

User enters an enclosed space in complete darkness with vibrating bed to lay on, surrounded by four speakers, experiences waves of vibration through the body. A microphone attached to bed. When speaking into microphone, user’s voice triggers different whale sounds.
Sound: material in context of sculpture. In using techniques to sculpt and spatialize sound, it creates a sonic sound field, one feels “enveloped” & “immersed”.
Using scientific properties of whale, I'm making a direct & metaphoric correlation bt. the physical mass & strength, longevity & complexity of songs & the ocean, their natural habitat, to my deeper self & inner strength.
Since the user doesn't know me nor how I feel, one ultimately experiences oneself through me.

Heather Greer

Passlet

Shilpan Bhagat

Passlet puts the world at your fingertips. It tracks the things you interact with physically on a daily basis allowing you to create reactive, self aware objects and build intuitive and interesting applications with it.

Description

Our body speaks a language of touch. We hold things we want to use, hug the people we love and feel the things we are curious about. Passlet is a technology that understands this language and assists you. Imagine your toothbrush tracking its own use, or your milk carton aware it's empty. What if the sandwich you picked up knew you and paid for itself without you going to the counter? With Passlet comes an era of self aware objects which act based on your touch. It works on the principle of capacitive coupling allowing data to be transferred seamlessly through your body onto objects and vice versa. Passlet is a wearable which hides in the background allowing for smarter and more meaningful interactions with our physical world.

Nancy Hechinger

LifeStrand: A Musical Self-Portrait

Negar Behbahani

If I were an instrument, what kind would it be? How would it be played? What are its tones? Its moods? What would I reveal to a new player or one who played me many times?

Description

My thesis project is a musical sculpture and self-portrait based on my nature, body, memory and background, told through the universal language of a music.
The instrument/sculpture's key features are the sound, the screen, and the hair, which has played an important role in all aspects of my life. My instrument connects with the intimate experience of touching my hair, and is a different and new experience, playing and hearing a poetic and feminine instrument.

It's for a general art audience for presentation in an art space.

Heather Greer

DiscoverED student collaboration through interactive syllabi

Sergio Majluf Jadue

DiscoverED is a web app for higher education teachers to create interactive syllabi in a timeline format. It simplifies course resource management and creates a online collaboration space for sharing, thinking and discussing class topics.

http://www.discover-ed.com

Description

The Internet offers a plethora of collaboration and general purpose management resources. The same is true for learning resources in the academic space. Yet most teachers still outline classes in static documents or hard to follow websites. DiscoverED is a new approach; instructors can use this interactive tool for planning courses and collaborative class activities.

DiscoverED renders syllabi as timelines, allowing multiple class units, content resources and milestones to be seamlessly added and managed by instructors over time. With this, students can navigate content and class progress as they zoom in and out, connecting everyone in a space to discuss and collaboratively create and share content.