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Spherescape

Barak Chamo, Mai Arakida Izsak

Float between what was and what could have been on November 8th, 2016, as three young women would remain as always, indestructible

http://www.maispace.space/2017/11/14/sphere/

Description

Spherescape is about mixing reality and fantasy, weaving between two hypothetical worlds in the blink of an eye in a floating lantern viewing pod. On November 8th, 2016, two diverging scenarios emerge as three young women celebrate on a rooftop. In one, they are a united force that strengthen one another as they brace themselves for a challenging future. In the other, they relish in an epic historic moment as the election of the first female president of the U.S. is announced. Spherescape is an exploration of the gap between traditional viewing experiences and emerging immersive formats, as well as between our memories and hopes.

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing, Introduction to Computational Media

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Good Vibrations

Barak Chamo, Jenna Xu

Enter the mind of a monk in our pan-sensory brain entrainment dome.

http://www.xujenna.com/itp_blog/category/sem-1-finals/

Description

Meditation requires years of practice to be fruitful, but entrainment may be a shortcut to less stress. Our dome is an immersion into in a four-minute, pan-sensory experience that we hope will reproduce the brain activity found in advanced meditation practitioners. Users wear a headset that measures their brain activity during the session, so they will be able to see how the experience affected their brainwaves afterwards.

Classes

Introduction to Computational Media, Introduction to Physical Computing

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Toys That Make Noise

Barak Chamo, Gabriel Goncalves, Mai Arakida Izsak

A little dollhouse of memories comes to life through the use of Mixed Reality and a Hololens headset.

https://

Description

Real memories deserve real objects, but most memories are now stored in cold cloud servers. Using Hololens and Vuforia image recognition, Toys that make WOW bring our digital memories to physical memorabilia set in a wooden doll house fixture. This project was first developed and demoed during the MIT Reality Virtually Hackathon.

Classes

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Transmotion

Barak Chamo

Transmotion is an experiment in capturing the essence of meaning and emotion. A narrator and mechanical performer that capture the beauty of poetry in motion.

https://barakchamo.com

Description

Transmotion is an attempt to capture the emotion and beauty of poetry and translate it, by means of mechanical interpretation and conversion, into machine performance. The apparatus is seeded with human input, beautiful pieces of poetry, and I want to know wether it is capable of evoking the same sense of expression and emotion.

The selected poems are processed through sentiment analysis to extract the affective score of parts of the text. It is then read by a mechanical text-to-speech synthesizer and sent, word-by-word, to the robotic performer. The performer receives each word in time and interprets it into 3-axial movement.

Is there a connection between the text and the motion, between the poet's intention and the machine interpretation, and are performative automata capable of capturing and conveying human emotion?

Classes

Designing for Digital Fabrication, Introduction to Physical Computing