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Business Fan

Joseph Baker

Bleeding the physical and the digital world together with an iconic folding fan.

https://

Description

Tokyo, Japan

As I was waiting for the train on a hot summer day, I see a business man pull out a discreetly crafted, folding fan. After stepping into the subway, he placed it in his front blazer pocket as the air conditioning took over. This memory is tied to a country where I let my happiness thrive in the face of unfamiliarity.

The allure is finding a purpose in it all. When time is spent questioning what someone wants to do, the physical world starts to peel back little by little like the folds of a fan ¬¬¬–Tucked out of view but not forgotten.

The fan’s projection evokes what it feels like to open yourself to the world. This incorporates depth and brings another dimension. Showing one wave made from a fan has ripples of effects even if it is not in the physical world.

Classes

Introduction to Computational Media, Introduction to Physical Computing

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Dance Floor MPC

Adi Dahiya

A playful dance floor experience which allows anyone to make beats with their body.

https://adi.pizza/slices/dance-floor-mpc/

Description

I'm making a matrix of dance floor tiles which act as a controller for a drum rack sampler & step sequencer. The software implements some of the key ideas from an Akai MPC and modern production workstations like Ableton. Users are invited to step up to the device, express themselves with a little dance over a 2- or 4-bar phrase, and hear back the resulting rhythm produced by the “Dance floor MPC”. Successive users can choose to “collaborate” with the previous user's recorded sequence. This is not a precise production tool, but rather a playful experience which enables anyone to enjoy making beats with their body.

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing, The Code of Music

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ChatBotany

Adrian Bautista

ChatBotany allows plants to interact with and express themselves to people through a chat interface.

https://www.chatbotany.xyz

Description

ChatBotany is the millennial gardening interface for today. The project connects a person to their plant through Facebook Messenger — allowing the plant to let their humans know when they're thirsty or lonely. The chat conversation also provides digital inputs that trigger physical events (such as watering the plant).

Plant personality traits based on the current state of the plant (e.g. “I'm thirsty!”) are represented through the images and the tone of messages sent by the plant to the human recipient. It explores our tendency to personify non-human entities and whether texting/chat interfaces are capable of communicating their personalities.

The project will be open-sourced, allowing anyone to build their own ChatBotany project at home.

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing

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Find Your Flow

Nuntinee Tan

‘Find Your Flow’ is a touch sensitive interactive installation that asks you to feel every pixel of its sequin surface and follow its vibration patterns until you ‘Find Your Flow’.

https://hellonun.blog/2018/12/05/find-your-flow/

Description

Our physical movement and sense of touch are a large part of our everyday perception, yet we only passively pay attention to them. By tuning into our senses, we become more perceptive of ourselves and our surroundings, and are more able to enjoy the nuances around us.

‘Find Your Flow’ is a touch sensitive interactive installation that asks you to tune into your sense of touch and movement, feel every pixel of its sequin surface and follow its vibration patterns until you ‘Find Your Flow’.

The installation tracks your movement i.e. your position and speed using a grid of FSR sensors; when you move at the right pace and in the right position for a certain period of time, the vibration stops, and the installation lets you continue on by yourself.

Mechanism: grid of 16 FSR sensors and 16 vibration motors

Material and size: sequin on soft pillow (80 sq.cm. wide, 15cm. high)

Additional elements: small LCD display displaying the status and direction for the installation

Keywords: touch sensitive, vibration, sequin, pixels, slow motion, movement, soft touch

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing

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The Music Box

David Azar

Compose different music arrangements with and old-school computer and punch cards

https://www.davidazar.mx/blog/the-music-box

Description

The Music Box is a project about music and abstract tangible interaction.

Technology has moved into a 2D space filled with screens. Sure, VR and AR are making an effort to make hybrid spaces between the physical and digital world, but screen of some sort is needed.

I am offering an exploration on music arrangement, inspired by old-school computing elements and based heavily on tangible interaction.

There are 15 different punch cards that users can insert in one of 12 slots. Depending on where that card is and its type, a sample of sound is played. Users can stack 3 different samples at a time, and they can be rhythmic, harmonic or melodic. Each section has three different instrument sounds.

This is a tool/exploration for musical composition.

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing, The Code of Music

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Flappy melody

Jingyi Wen, Xinyue Li

This is a physical "flappy bird" game where players control the bird to avoid the barriers by singing.

https://wp.nyu.edu/xinyueli/2018/11/14/pcom-final-updates-week-nov-7-13/

Description

This project is inspired by the game “flappy bird”, but is designed in a more physical and interactive way. The basic setting is two glass cylinder, the smaller one's diameter is 5 inches and the bigger one's diameter is around 6 inches. Between them will be some ferrofluid.

For the interaction, the users get the control over the ferrofluid dot attracted by the magnet inside and to avoid some real physical barriers between the two glass layers by singing a specific tone. If hit the barrier, the magnetic force would be erased and the ferrofluid would drop down.

While the vertical movements are controlled by the players and will reflect the frequency of their voice, the horizontal movement (rotation) is made automatically with each interaction.

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing

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Lost and Found Bots

Ashley Lewis

Like all of us at times, these bots are lost without one another, until you connect their hands and help them feel found

https://ashleyjanelewis.com/2018/10/05/lost-found-bots/

Description

This project was created in Fabrication at the beginning of the semester, just after I had moved from Canada to the US to attend ITP. Perhaps it was a manifestation of feeling out a new space, but these bots felt very therapeutic to design and make. Two comical 5″ bots, sit side by side, both similar but not congruent. Their tiny screens read as “lost” and their light are off. Connecting their hands, brings them closer together, as though they are hugging or kissing. Once connected, their screens read as “found” and their lights turn on.

The best part about this project was its ability to make others assess their feeling of lost or found. I posted it to Instagram and was able to instigate many conversations around empathy, in some cases, for my situation but, in most cases, around a situation of a stranger. A woman from Toronto whom I haven’t met showed the bots to her son immediately requested to build a pair of his own – a first for him in his exploration in electronic making. This little piece about lonely bots turned into a vessel for emotive conversations.

Classes

Intro to Fabrication, Introduction to Physical Computing

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Music Between Us

Jiwon Shin, Rashida Kamal

Music Between Us (title tentative) is a set of wearable musical instruments in the form of embroidered jackets, meant to be worn by two (or potentially more) users, that invites users to explore and play with the boundaries of comfort, in touching and being touched.

https://js6450.github.io/PhysicalComputing/weekly/musicbetweenus.html

Description

Music Between Us (title tentative) is a set of wearable musical instruments, meant to be worn by two (or potentially more) users at a time. It takes the form of embroidered jackets that when touched, triggers a range of melodic and rhythmic elements that are added to an existing soundscape. The soundscape begins with a “heartbeat” percussive piece that continues for the duration of the soundscape. The variety of sounds builds as the users interact with each other by making contact with the embroidered elements on their jackets, occasionally including additional percussive elements as contact between the users intensifies.

The regions of embroidered elements on the jacket represent a topography of meanings — some locations on the jacket may suggest a more casual connection and others, more intimate. The piece invites users to explore and play with the boundaries of comfort, in touching and being touched. The piece is also a social experiment in the sense of prompting the users whether their default boundaries of comfort would be altered under the context of art and play.

The wireless wearable jacket is is constructed using a polyester base material and conductive thread for the embroidery and circuit connection. Areas of embroidery are used for input for the capacitive touch sensors (MPR121) and the users' touch data is communicated via Bluetooth over the Web Bluetooth API to trigger sounds over the web. Each of the sounds that can be triggered via capacitive touch sensors are initially composed as a soundscape designed in the way that regardless of how many sounds are triggered, the soundscape sounds natural and reflective of the level of touches between the participants.

Classes

Introduction to Physical Computing

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Vo-5ynth

Tushar Goyal

Generative music instrument that makes music algorithmically from the users voice

https://wp.nyu.edu/tushargoyal/2018/12/05/vo-5ynth/

Description

Vo-5ynth, pronounced “vo-synth” (short for “voice-synthesizer in p5”) is a music instrument, but, its not a an ordinary one. First it doesn't have a sound of its own. Instead, it uses the users voice to make music. Second, its a generative music instrument so it doesn't give the user complete control over the music making process, instead, it encourages the user to (in a way) collaborate with the instrument (“the machine”) to make music. The user can define the pool of notes from which music can be generated but the actual output (notes for the bass, melody, harmony) is generated algorithmically by the instrument. The user can change the selected notes in real time to change how the music sounds and can thus, play this as an instrument that can be performed live or be used as an ideation tool, or just for fun really!

Classes

Intro to Fabrication, Introduction to Computational Media, Introduction to Physical Computing, The Code of Music

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Phubbing Puppets

Rui Wang, Su He, Helen Tang

Give us your phone, pass down ur phubbing habit 😉

https://medium.com/@sh5304/icm-final-concept-9954883595e0

Description

Phubbing refers to as phone snubbing, where we slip back and fall into the habit of constantly checking our phones, retract from physical interaction and immerse in the virtual world. In collaboration with Rui Wang and Su He, we set out to explore how to demonstrate this phenomenon, while at the same time, actively seeking approaches to tackle this behavior if possible. Through three main stages of user testing and test play, our idea evolved over time and turned out more engaging.
Our final piece is an interactive installation that illustrates the phenomenon and provoke further thoughts within viewers.

Classes

Introduction to Computational Media, Introduction to Physical Computing