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BoomChaCha!

Wangshu Sun, Yue Zhang, FY Zhu

BoomChaCha! is a physical musical role-playing game where three players will fight together against monsters.

http://bit.ly/BoomChaCha

Description

About BoomChaCha!

This is a physical musical role-playing game(RPG) where three players will fight together against monsters, with magical weapons in their hands.

Basically there is a warrior attacking the monster, a defender defending all of the three, and a mage healing all of the three. The three characters share the same life so they will get hurt or get healed for the same amount of health.

Unlike most of the RPG games, BoomChaCha! is musical. This means it is always better to follow the rhythm while playing. There's always a “Boom Cha Cha, boom cha cha” six-beat pattern repeating itself in the 6/8 background music, which creates a feeling of dancing party rather than a dangerous fight. During the first three “Boom Cha Cha”, you can do attacking, defending or healing by hitting the first “Boom” with the physical sword, shield or wand, and the effects will be executed in the next three “boom cha cha”. That is to say, if the warrior hits the first “Boom” beat, an attack will be executed in the next “boom cha cha”; if the defender/mage hits the first “Boom” beat, the next “boom” it will start defending/healing all the characters.

Since our aim is to invite people to play together, acting cooperatively should get better results than doing alone, so we designed an “assistance” logic with the “Cha Cha” beats. That is to day, if the warrior hits the “Boom” followed by the other two hitting the next two “Cha”, “Cha” beats, you will get a huge attack-power bonus and can kill the monster fast without getting too much damage. The same applies to the mage and the defender.The more assists, the better effects the players will get. Better results are also granted by the better timings of you three hitting the first three “Boom Cha Cha” in the six-beat patterns in the music.

At the beginning you will be in a practice mode to learn how to play. When you think your are ready, you can enter the fighting mode and the monster will start attacking you. Try to kill him fast and prepare a defend before his attack, and during the gap after you kill a monster, it’s a good time for you to get healed.

In all, if you want to survive and thrive, follow the beats and dancing together!

Classes

Introduction to Computational Media, Introduction to Physical Computing, Introduction to Physical Computing

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Demolition Library

David Gochfeld

A Virtual Reality experience in an abandoned library where you explore, knock over shelves and throw books around, all operated with a real book.

Description

Put on your headset and enter a mysterious abandoned library. What is this place? How long has it been like this? What are you doing there? Who cares? Pick up a book. Throw it. Knock things over. Make a mess. In Virtual Reality, no one will tell you how to behave.

An exploration of physical interaction with virtual space, and a meditation on the impact of obsolete technology.

Classes

DIY-VR

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Ephemera

Thea Rae, Quest Kennelly

Ephemera is a device that illuminates the chaotic turbulent flow created in air by human gestures.

http://www.questkennelly.com/index.php/pro-dev-2/

Description

We are all living under an ocean of air. Every movement we make sends out a cacophony of ripples, eddies, waves and wavelets. We displace our own personal volumes, and leave trails in our wake wherever we go. All of this chaotic beauty goes unseen, and unrecognized. What if it could be made visible? What if our gestures could reveal their own turbulent echoes in space? Our hands are our best tools for generating meaning through gesture, and our instinct to touch things with our hands is universal.
Ephemera is a wearable device that generates a fog of light scattering vapor. This vapor is pushed to the hands through flexible tubing, and illuminated by powerful, flexible LED arrays on lycra gloves. In operation Ephemera allows the user to create magical, fleeting clouds of turbulence with every gesture, and movement. In the video, Thea Rae performs with the device on a darkened stage. The only illumination is from the gloves, and the fog scatters the light in clouds of turbulent flow.

Classes

Project Development Studio

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pineArt Box

Kevin G Stirnweis, Rebecca (Marks) Leopold

Create digital images using a mixture of natural elements and analog inputs.

Description

pineArt Box invites people to create a digital image using natural elements like pine needles and analog inputs to customize the color. As users interact with the system a live stream of their work is displayed in front of them. Once they are satisfied they can create a copy of their image with a push of the button that will display their creation next to the live stream. As people interact with the system they can enjoy natural sounds of the woods and the scent of the pine needles to create a meditative and creative experience. pineArt Box explores the interaction between the digital and natural worlds, as well as the interplay between art and process.

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing

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Real Me

Jingwen Zhu

Real Me is a live chatting app with BLE connected sensors that uses graphics and messages to reveal user's real emotion during chatting.

Description

Real Me is a chatting app with BLE connected muscle sensor, pulse sensor and vibration sensor. It tracks user's emotion while chatting and using system messages to tell the real emotion of the user. Sensor readings also draws out geometric motion graphics as the background of the chatting room.

Classes

Designing for Data Personalization, Live Web, Understanding Networks

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Treegered

Fan-Hao Tseng

A small move can make big changes. Plant a seed and you'll get a forest!

Description

A platform(land) covered with soil and a pot in front of it will be placed in front of the crowd. People can place the seed into the pot, and dozens of trees will grow out from the soil platform in set sequence. After the previous participant leaves, the trees shriveled back to the underground, and wait for the next person to plant the seed.

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing

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Snowcam

Melanie Hoff, Shir David

Physical snowglobe creates digital snow over a live webcam footage

http://www.shirdaviditp.com/physical-computing-week-7-midterm-project/

Description

This project consists of a screen displaying a live webcam of NYC. On a small platform in front of the screen will sit a snow globe with the same NYC scene shown in the webcam within it. When a user shakes the snow globe, it will appear to snow in the live webcam. The speed and direction of the snowfall onscreen will mimic that of the snowfall in the globe.

The snow is a p5 simulation that connects to an Arduino in the bottom of the snow globe via serial communication. The snow simulation code is controlled by reading and mapping values from an accelerometer. Currently, the NYC webcam footage is actually a recording but we plan on directly embedding the live NYC webcam footage for the winter show.

This project playfully leverages the prevailing belief that live webcams represent the truth.

Melanie Hoff and Shir David created this for Benedetta Piantella's PCOMP mid-term.

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing

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Rube Telephone

Chino Kim, Aaron Montoya-Moraga

A Rube Goldberg telephone that tangibly processes and translates conversation between two people, creating a fun audiovisual experience using various old and new communications technologies and producing unexpected outcomes.

Description

Using Morse code, language translation and optical character recognition, our contraption processes and manipulates conversation between two hacked rotary phones. Each step in the chain reaction is a tangible experience and occasionally distorts the message as it passes it along.

A one-way transmission may look like this:

Someone speaks into phone 1 > their sentence gets tapped out on a Morse key by a solenoid > the resulting Morse code gets translated back to English and then to Spanish > the Spanish string is spoken by the machine and then gets translated back to English > the resulting sentence gets printed out by a thermal printer, a camera takes a photo of the printed text and the text gets pulled out of the image using OCR. Both the camera view and the OCR output would be shown on a display > the resulting sentence is then spoken through the earpiece of phone 2.

To do:

– Reverse the signal flow when going from phone 2 to phone 1.

– Use audio thresholds to control the direction of transmission and properly route audio signals.

– Play hold music in phone earpieces while message is being processed.

– Improve OCR (crop photo, error handling).

– Implement autocorrect so that words mangled by Morse or OCR get converted to actual words before they’re passed off to the next step (Google search suggestions API).

– Code ringer behavior – if one phone is picked up, the other rings (we are already able to make the phones ring, we just need to program the Arduino to control them).

– Build/buy stands and mounts for each “station” (two phones, Morse, translation, OCR).

– Write an Arduino program that will control a light bulb progress bar (we already have the relays and wiring in place for this).

– Write a Morse code program that will convert the signals tapped out on the Morse key back to English (this isn’t a priority since we can fake it and use the English string from the previous step).

Classes

Introduction to Computational Media, Introduction to Physical Computing

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Dandi

Anne Goodfriend, Marcelina A Nowak

Walk past this beautiful digital dandelion and watch it fly away with the “wind”.

http://annekgoodfriend.com/p-comp-midterm-dandi/

Description

Dandi is a screen based project featuring a digital dandelion that blows away, as if by the wind, in the direction of whomever has just walked in front of it. We were inspired by our childhood, when one of the biggest joy was blowing on a dandelion.

Our project is an interactive installation reminding us of a play, childhood and beauty.

The project is built using p5js and the Particle systems library. It uses Distance Measuring Sensors, the newPing Library, and the arduino, to determine the direction of any person walking in front of the sensor box.

The dandelion was made of small dandelion svg files, which were drawn in Adobe Illustrator. Then, looped in spiral shape, created our fancy dandelion shape. A simple particle system allowed to achieve a ‘blow effect’ and capture the inherent fluidity and energy of the whole project.

It is playful and fun to watch. People seem to really want know about it and engage with it. We love the nostalgia and the playfulness of it.

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing

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Monuments to Hart Island

Nicholas Hubbard, Rebecca Lieberman

Monuments to Hart Island is an explorable virtual environment that houses memorials to the present and history of Hart Island.

http://www.peachriot.com/proposal-museum-of-hart-island/

Description

Hart Island is a one mile landform off the east coast of the Bronx, directly adjacent to City Island.  Originally used as a Civil War training, POW, and then burial location, it was purchased by the City of New York in 1869 and its primary purpose became serving as the final resting place for the indigent and unclaimed dead of the city.  Now managed by the Department of Corrections, Hart Island still fulfills this role, with as many as 1,500 bodies being buried on the island every year by inmates from Riker’s Island.

Monuments to Hart Island takes into account the island’s present condition, which is to say, nearly inaccessible and hidden in plain sight; you can’t actually go to Hart Island unless you arrange it through the DOC, cameras are not allowed, and unless you are a relative, you can’t visit burial sites (active or inactive).

As a result we have chosen the format of a virtual reality museum & memorial both to what physically exists on Hart Island and to the barriers faced when trying to encounter what’s there, using a 3d reconstruction of the island from aerial maps to allow a user  to navigate multiple layers of consciously obscured content and media. The experience is defined by a series of speculative & abstract memorials (or reimagined markers) that surface physical realities of burial on the island.

Our final installation at the ITP Winter Show will consist of:

An explorable virtual space/environment that tells the story of Hart Island, played in a headset (Oculus or Gear VR)

A small accompanying installation which includes a sign-in book that mimics the ledger visitors must register with through the NYC Department of Corrections

In-progress Unity demos

https://vimeo.com/148041641

Classes

Cabinets of Wonder, DIY-VR, In Their Shoes