Category: Projects

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Space Mapper Car

SMC is an excessively small remote-controlled car that uses IR distance sensors to scan any objets in its surrounding area and map them out on screen.

Yonatan Rozin

https://youtu.be/i3Ywkyw1BDQ

Description

Space-mapper car is a tiny car––less than 5×9″ large––that uses IR distance sensors to detect walls and objects in its surrounding area and map them out on screen. Using two N20 encoded gear motors, the car can accurately track its movement speed and angle and transmit them through serial communication to p5.js, which can use the information, along with the data from its 2 Sharp IR distance sensors, to gradually piece together a rough map of the space.

The user can choose between 2 modes, each curating a different interaction between the physical space and the on-screen map. In the first mode, the car will fill out a map of its surrounding space on screen, as described above. In the second, more entertaining mode, a path will be drawn on screen for the robot to follow, and a series of lines will be drawn parallel to the prescribed path. The user will have to place a series of objects along the car's physical path in order to match the on-screen map as best as possible. The two modes therefore allow for bi-directional interaction between the car's physical space and its on-screen replication; the physical space dictates the on-screen map in the first mode, and vice-versa in the second mode.

ITPG-GT.2233.00002, ITPG-GT.2301.00006
ICM, Intro to Phys. Comp.
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cyber$exb0t

cyber$exb0t is an interactive cybersex voice-chat experience with your computer. Users are able to choose from options of voices, ranging in pitch, to have cybersex with.

Tina Rungsawang, Zeyao Li

https://youtu.be/U1QRf77XYPY

Description

What would it be like if we had the chance to have intimate experiences with different kinds of people, different kinds of voices? How would it be different to get intimate with a low-pitched voice entity, vs a high-pitched one?

cyber$exb0t is an experience that allows users to playfully explore intimacy with different voices from the computer. They will have the option of choosing a voice to interact with, and go on a series of on-screen interactions to satisfy the computer through a cybersex chat. We are hoping that through this experience, people will be more open to having intimate interactions with different voices.

The mood of this experience is sexy, nostalgic, and fun! The aesthetics are heavily inspired by early 2000's cybersex chatrooms on AIM.

ITPG-GT.2988.001
Hello, Computer: Unconventional Uses of Voice Technology
Sound,Play/Games
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Mindful Matter

Mindful Matter is a conversation UI based interaction where users can use their voice and navigate a mindfulness website and relax themselves. The process involves interacting at various points with a website so that users can feel relaxed and away from their worries.

Ashwita Palekar

https://mindful-matter.glitch.me/

Description

Mindful Matters was a project that I came up with in my moment of distress and anxiousness due to the pandemic scare shortly after the Thanksgiving break as a close contact of mine who I lived with was tested positive. At the moment, I went through many phases of emotions, and with many deadlines approaching for work, I was in a state of shock, the shock of my emotions that rendered me completely unproductive. I took the opportunity of this time and explore how I would go about navigating these emotions and hence came Mindful Matter.

ITPG-GT.2161.001, ITPG-GT.2988.001
Game Design and the Psychology of Choice (Online), Hello, Computer: Unconventional Uses of Voice Technology
Play/Games,Product Design
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Light Up 2020

An interactive miniature installation that invites people to take a peek at normal people’s daily life under quarantine.

Jingyao Shao, Viola He

https://vimeo.com/489099811

Description

Light Up 2020 is an interactive miniature installation that uses light and projection to explore moments in mundane lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. Seeing the silhouette of 4 people living in a neighboring building, the audience is given a flashlight to shine through their windows and reveal the residents in full color, eavesdropping on their conversations, interactions, and observing snippets of their day-to-day life.

We were inspired by our lockdown experiences in populated cities hard-hit by the pandemic — how our daily routines changed as we spent the majority of our days home alone, and how our relationships with our neighbors evolved. We read stories from Wuhan, Milan, New York City and beyond, about people coping with the lockdown through music, art, self-care, cheering for essential workers, and loving balcony exchanges with their neighbors. We hope to create a narrative, present in the form of an interactive installation utilizing paper model, light, and projection, to capture that spirit. We wrote and devised 4 stories with the help of some of our friends at ITP. Some characters come from our minds, some inspired by their own stories, brought to life through their improvisation acting. In this generic 3-story apartment building, you get to take a look at unique personalities, sending care to their loved ones, enjoying songs and movements, despite the unusual circumstances.

There’s also something inherently interesting about watching and being watched that comes with urban living where we can peak at people’s lives through their windows. The interaction of spotlighting through a window is, in turn, a discussion of our voyeuristic curiosity as human beings. Playing around with the scale, this miniature installation also offers an unprecedented intimate storytelling experience.

ITPG-GT.2301.00005
Intro to Phys. Comp.
Art,Narrative/Storytelling
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Asleep with One Eye Open – An Interactive Surveillance Sculpture

Asleep with One Eye Open is an interactive sculpture. It visualizes police surveillance through a visceral form factor that combines new technologies such as facial recognition and robotics with age-old motifs such as spiders and puppetry.

Daniel Johnston, Kevin He, Todd Whitney

https://vimeo.com/492099161

Description

Conversations and public understanding of police surveillance are clouded by the fact that surveillance is an abstraction for most. Even as surveillance reaches into all aspects of our lives, our conversations about its impact on our well being are understated.

Police are one of the most powerful surveillance agents in American society. Under public pressure over recent years, American police have started using body worn cameras (BCWs) and touting them as great transparency tools between police and the public. However, their use of BCWs raises new issues over who controls the images, when and how the cameras should be operated, should the cameras detect faces, etc.

We've used these questions to create an interactive sculpture that questions police power, surveillance, and our ability to confront these powers. Suspended from the ceiling, the humanoid sculpture dons a police tactical uniform draped with four BCWs. Its initial focal point is the realistic 3D printed face, generated with machine learning fed on the faces of American police union leaders. As the audience investigates the face they unwillingly create a threat to the sculpture and it responds. The body cameras open up, revealing themselves to be animatronic eyes that converge on the viewer. Even as you try to escape, the infrared eyes on the body cameras make it known that you can't avoid its gaze once you've been seen.

The sculpture is the first step in a larger installation about surveillance. By combining new technologies such as facial recognition and robotics with age-old motifs like spiders and puppetry, Asleep with One Eye Open creates visceral feelings and perspectives on surveillance that lets the viewer know that they cannot escape once the eyes have been centered on them.

ITPG-GT.2301.00001
Intro to Phys. Comp.
Art,Privacy/Security
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Haunt That House!

Have you ever wanted to be dead and haunt the house of an actual human? Well today's your lucky day!

David Currie, John Bezark

https://www.loom.com/share/24a6f868f52d4ee09a4a4307ab9700f0

Description

Haunt that House is a many vs one player ghostly arcade game where several ghosts in a digital space compete against one human in a physical space. As the ghosts float around and interact with digital objects, they trigger real world effects like changing the color of a lamp to a ghastly green or making household objects rattle and shake.

The human, meanwhile has a handy dandy ghost detector which they can point at objects to detect the presence of the paranormal and which can be used to ZAP the ghosts and kick them out of the objects. The ghost detector communicates with the haunted household objects which enables for a very reliable “scanning” effect which reveals the presence of the paranormal.

The ghosts have 3 minutes to haunt 2 of the 3 objects in the humans house an the human is just trying to keep all the ghosts at bay! Things still in development for the project are a “fancier ui” for the ghost and a little bit clearer feedback for the ghost hunter, but the underlying communication and interactions are really solid. We are very happy with how reliable the interactions are between the humans and the ghost, now it's just a matter of adding a little bit of polish which we are very confident we can do in the time remaining!

While the game is on the surface quite silly, we were really drawn to the questions like “how can you make a game that is playable across a digital and physical divide?” With so many ITP students in various parts of the globe, we hope that our spooky little experience can bring folks together in a new and interesting way.

ITPG-GT.2233.00002, ITPG-GT.2301.00006
ICM, Intro to Phys. Comp.
Play/Games
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Cyborgian Rock

The Cyborgian Rock, a fictional entity experienced via a chatbot, stimulates animistic imagination in the user.

Maria Maciak

https://vimeo.com/489249670

Description

The Cyborgian Rock (CR) explores the untapped potentialities of social presence theory in technology. Social presence can be defined as the sense of being with another and is exploited by the designers of products such as Alexa or Tamagotchi.

The CR experience is the opposite of our encounters with consumer techno-products. It does not serve a utilitarian purpose or provide consumerist pleasures. Instead, it steers one towards reflections on nature, ancient traditions, and traditional modes of understanding as they relate to the modern experience.

The rock entity speaks obliquely, evoking both a sense of a non-human consciousness and providing the negative space necessary for a sense of social presence. The rock's responses touch on ideas stemming from animistic traditions, thus marrying the digital interface design and ancient modes of projecting social presence onto the natural world.

IMALR-GT.202, IMALR-GT.201 , IMALR-GT.201 , IMALR-GT.202
Critical Experiences, Connections Lab, Connections Lab, Critical Experiences
Culture,Narrative/Storytelling
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iWind_

Use your body control to play with the wind

Binyan Xu,

https://youtu.be/xytzRsYMmDE

Description

My project is iWind.

You can use the rotation of your head to drive the Arduino to control the character’s flying in a simulated real world, like wind passing over forests and lakes.And you can also try to swim in the universe.

Arduino is installed on an action camera accessories/helmet and connected to Unreal Engine.

(iWind is designed and made by Michelle Xu and Wei Wu)

ITPG-GT.2301.00007, ITPG-GT.2079.00001
Intro to Phys. Comp., Virtual Production (Online)
Play/Games,Wearables
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Tidal Observation Instrument

The Tidal Observation Instrument brings tides from around the globe into the audible range and allows their tones to mix and mingle.

Daniel Fries

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQQ2tiA1xrE

Description

The Tidal Observation Instrument starts with four tides. It uses historical data from the International Oceanographic Commission to log those tides as wavetables, and allows an instrumentalist to control the speed of the signal, from the native tidal frequency of 0.0000016Hz up to a more typical Low-Frequency Oscillator range of 0.01Hz. This LFO is allowed to modulate a sample of the waveform playing at 440Hz (Concert A). As the four tides play, it's possible to hear the last several days of tides across the globe resonate with each other, leading towards a strange new metaphor for the waves.

ITPG-GT.2040.001
Time
Sound,Art
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OTE

OTE is a lo-fi mini-game made in p5 in which the user uses their hand+webcam to protect an alien named OTE on planet Earf from bad weather.

Matthew Yue Li

https://vimeo.com/489248298

Description

OTE is a project created in 2020 by Elijah Alvarez and Matthew Li. OTE is a video game created in p5.js that tells the story of OTE, an alien who lives alone on planet Earf. The user interacts with the video game via their webcam and the ml5 Handpose model. The model tracks the users hand, which they use to control a hand that floats above OTE. The objective is for the user to use the floating sky hand to protect OTE from bad weather.

​The concept for OTE came from our idea to do a reverse take on the choose your own adventure form of storytelling. Instead of controlling a character in an external world, we decided to have the user control the external world which affects a character with free will. After learning the backstory of OTE, with enough empathy, the user should feel some responsibility to protect OTE as long as possible.

IMNY-UT.101.001, IMNY-UT.102.00001
Creative Computing, Comm Lab: Hypercinema
Play/Games