Natalie Tschechaniuk

The Amazing Interactive Memory Machine is an opportunity to experience a different perspective of Coney Island through a collection of personal histories. Visitors select a category and are transported through audio to another time.

Description

The Amazing Interactive Memory Machine (AIMM) is a site-specific vending machine that dispenses memories. Placed on the Coney Island boardwalk, visitors are invited to choose a memory by pressing a button. With each press, listeners have a new opportunity to hear stories from other New Yorkers, stories about things that have changed or that persist despite change. At the conclusion of each story, a souvenir receipt prints out. Listeners can contribute to the machine by calling and leaving their memories on a voicemail system. AIMM offers a personal perspective of an historical place and an opportunity for unexpected experiences.

Natasha Dzurny

A simple kinetic display for personal information, at a glance.

http://just-glance.com

Description

With the mass adoption of smartphones, wearables, and apps that collect personal data, so much is being tracked. Glance builds on the quantified self market to enhance the way collected data influences its users. It makes information more available, more relevant, and more beautiful by placing simple, iconic displays in meaningful places. Glance is a kinetic wall piece designed as home decor and includes a configuration app for multiple data sources. Using basic geometric shapes, the display is read quickly at a glance. As the smartphone slips away from the center of the digital ecosystem, look to Glance for a relevant display of knowledge, understanding and inspiration.

Rose Swan Meacham

Moving Portraits is a video series that documents the subtle facial gestures that express internal emotional states. Fusing art and scientific practices, nearly 100 portraits of the six universal emotions were recorded and analyzed quantitatively.

Description

Psychological research has classified six facial expressions that correspond to distinct universal emotions: disgust, sadness, happiness, fear, anger, and surprise. But do we truly understand how to interpret these internal states in other people? And is it possible for a computer to use predictive algorithms to determine emotions in humans? In an effort to explore these question, I generated a series of slow motion video portraits documenting the detailed gestures and physiological states of subjects responding to emotional stimuli. A classification tool and library of quantified emotions was used to analyze the subjects' movements and train neural networks to identify the motions indicating specific internal states.

Sam Slover

Wrap Genius is a personal journey into better food labeling. For 12 weeks, I carefully tracked all of my grocery purchases, recorded the data, and created a new visual framework to better make sense of it all. It's my dream food label.

Description

The food we buy matters. As our food systems become increasingly complex, the food we choose to consume affects not only our own health, but also the environment, our ethical framework, the Earth's biodiversity, and so much more. But much of the data of our food purchases remains opaque to us as end consumers. This isn’t good enough. So, I went on a mission to come up with something better. For 12 weeks, I carefully tracked all of my grocery purchases and created a new visual framework to better understand it all. Where does my food come from? What are my healthiest and unhealthiest choices? Which foods have GMOs? My dashboard shows me all of this information and more. It's my dream food label, designed for the interests of the consumer.

Jing Zhao

Pleashare is a web application that provides sex toy reviews for Chinese users. It encourages them to share their experiences and start conversations about their sexual pleasure.

Description

Recently, Chinese women are becoming more open to sex, but their awareness of their own sexuality is still evolving. Sex toys help women’s sexual exploration, Pleashares helps them establish their sex identity and personal words in sex and sexuality discussion. With Pleashares, users can review sex toys, see other user’s exerience of body exploration with sex toy, and build conversations based on collective hashtags. Through understanding how to get pleasure from their own bodies, women get to know themselves on their own and not just from others.

Kang-Ting Peng

Quantify your heartbeat. Display it on the road.

Description

"CARDIO" is a pulse detector on the steering wheel in your car to measure the driver's heartbeat. After receiving and quantifying the driver's heartbeat information, "CARDIO" sends the information to the LED strips mounted outside the car. By syncing the person and the machine, "CARDIO" makes the car a way to communicate on the road. "CARDIO" is a tool for quantifying the driver's emotions and assists other drivers in detecting situations such as road rage. In this way, "CARDIO" attempts to connect drivers and road users in a more personal visual way.

Colin Narver

When selecting a restaurant, more options doesn't lead to better choices. Last Eats is a mobile web app that helps you choose a single restaurant based on the culinary knowledge, passion and loyalty showcased by your friends and extended network.

http://lasteats.com/

Description

Most restaurant discovery apps operate with the idea that more options are better. Last Eats takes the opposite approach.

By constraining choice to the single most important meal in a given city, Last Eats enables you to demonstrate passion and loyalty towards the restaurants that help define you. Last Eats connects you with your friends and extended network and allows you to see and share your collective choices.

Through radical selectivity, Last Eats lets you discover the most essential, meaningful meals in the most useful way – one restaurant, one city and one choice at a time.

Courtney Nadine Coleman

BriteRise for Early Childhood is a web and mobile platform that creates a more personalized learning path by allowing parents and early childhood educators to track, visualize and communicate a child's health and growth data in real-time.

http://www.briterise.us

Description

BriteRise for Early Childhood is a web and mobile platform that allows parents, educators, and health professionals to become more aware of a child's overall wellness through the ability to receive real-time observational and objective data. The system not only allows for the manual documentation of a child's growth and development, but caretakers have the ability to obtain, visualize, and analyze physical data of a child from popular consumer heart monitors and other biosensors to get more objective data in assessing a child's well-being.

Donna Miller Watts

Fictioning, or the Confession of the Librarian is an immersive interpretation of the Jorge Luis Borges story, "The Library of Babel" via the Oculus Rift. The experiencer will move within the tale as it unfolds and comments on itself.

Description

Three-dimensional, physically interactive technologies such as the Oculus Rift are changing gaming and will change other forms of entertainment, including book publishing and theater. Fictioning, or the Confession of the Librarian utilizes numbers, letters, abstract shapes, lines, objects and animated text that change as the experiencer moves. Words and images derived from the text emerge. A reading of "The Library of Babel," will play over headphones, at times changing with the user's movements. Fictioning, or the Confession of the Librarian blends fiction, theater and physical interaction to offer a new art form for the the technological landscape of the future.

Fang-Yu Yang

Tachi is a toy bundle that combines tangible toys with a customized mobile application. Tachi creates a platform to encourage preschool children to make their own toys and to physically interact with the story.

Description

Creativity blooms in 4-6 year olds. It is also an important time to learn graphic, sound, speed identification and self-discipline. Tachi integrates the physical and virtual worlds, providing kids a new way to explore traditional tangible toys in the digital era.

Tachi consists of two parts: tangible toys and a tablet application. Kids can make animal faces with Play-Doh using a special acrylic base and customise them by decorating their faces with light pipe components. When kids move and rotate their own animal face on the Tachi tablet app, they create animal sound effects and graphic animation and also get light feedback on the animal's face. Finally, kids can generate their own animal's song with a recording and composing function.