ITP Winter Show 2008
ITP is a two-year graduate program located in the Tisch
School of the Arts whose mission is to explore the imaginative use of
communications technologies — how they might augment, improve, and
bring delight and art into people’s lives. Perhaps the best way to
describe us is as a Center for the Recently Possible.
The Winter show is a two day exhibition of interactive sight, sound, and physical objects by the student artists of ITP
First off you have to say thanks for sharing and opening up the classroom to all. I think it
benefits the students, industry and academics alike.
This year was one of the more impressive classes that I have seen – imho. I really enjoyed the full range of offerings and probably missed a ton of good stuff and need to do another run though to be more thorough.
I
am partial to the following tracts but included things I found
interesting across all the presentations. But wearable, mobile an
locative was my primary focus then visuals and visualizations, games,
tangible interfaces and performance interfaces after that.
Overall Trends: Dreams and memories, twitter, Nokia95 was the most seen in hand phone and dev phone but iPhone were the most displayed on walls and handouts.
Twitter was by far the most adopted webservice across all areas.
The
fact that many presenters did not have a card or handout to remember
them (yes I know its a digital era) was stunning. The best hand out
was a strip of fabric with the website name written on a sharpie.
The fabric was strong and durable like the indelible sharpie ink the
site name was written in (turfbombing.com)
I wish I went to school where there were classes called the live web. I have still yet to find quality instant cloning and time travel projects my main r&d needs right now.
I have been going for years to these shows and I thought it might be good to share some of the ones I liked.
Still going over the night and remembering some projects I need to add.(pentameter poem driven tag cloud and some others) So stop back in a day for some additional notes.
What I really liked…
A Little Awkward
Users will log on to the site when they’d like to do something with
someone (grab some lunch, coffee, a beer, etc.), but don’t have a
friend on hand to accompany them. On the site, users will post an
invitation for an ‘awkward encounter’ to the neighborhood in which they
are situated. Other users in the same neighborhood will then see this
invitation and have the choice of meeting up with the poster for the
selected activity. When another user accepts, both parties will receive
sms messages explaining where they should meet and how to identify each
other upon arrival. During the encounter, the strangers will have to
take a photo of an awkward sighting/moment for upload to the website.
This photo will serve as proof of the encounter and offer an ice
breaking activity to engage in while interacting with the new stranger.
The hope is that through use of the website people will meet all sorts
of interesting characters in the city and have great stories to tell
afterward.
Why I like it: Catchy realistic (i often use twitter this way with my connections) and most of all because
Lonely is an Eyesore.
Clinq.tv
Gambling Meets Online TV
flash example
Mini-Series,
Sitcoms, Reality-TV, Soaps Operas lack online spaces for viewers to
congregate and interact. Our target is a simple prototype that
demonstrates how this could be solved with something addictive and fun,
gambling.
Why I like it: Real time community around the programing – this is the kind of service and social feature sets
cable companies should be buying fast. Done right it could even drive people to participate around the old behavior of appointment based television which old media still clings to.
Dream Jammies
Stay connected across time zones: Dream Jammies offer you a non-invasive way to see how your loved ones are sleeping – or not.
http://artandprogram.com/dreamjammies/
Dream Jammies
are pajamas which are aware of your body in several ways. They know
whether you are standing or laying down, tossing or lying quietly.
DreamJammies also know your body temperature. This information is
relayed to your partner’s iPhone, and expressed on their screen in
color, changing inrealtime.
As you lay down to sleep, the
screen fades from green to blue, the shade of blue reflecting your body
temperature. As you roll around, the screen flickers red. By shaking
the iPhone your partner is able to reach out, causing the chest of your
pajamas to vibrate. Not pleasant while you sleep, but a perfect alarm
clock. Not only are you able to keep in touch while living on opposite
sides of the world, DreamJammies offer insight into how you sleep by capturing data as you snooze.
Why I liked it: I am tactile its cute and this was soft and cuddly (yes I said that) and about sleep and staying close to loved ones. Presentation was spot on and the PJ’s were couture – Bring it. and the (or not)
TwiTerra
TwiTerra reveals how people use Twitter to share and re-share ideas, building connections that encircle the world.
TwiTerra
is built on the social messaging service Twitter, which allows users to
broadcast 140-character status updates for interested friends, family,
coworkers and strangers. It is common for Twitter users to re-broadcast
the ‘tweets’ of others, and these ‘retweets’ repeat an idea or pass on
a message from a person that the initial user is following to all of
the people who are following that person, with attribution given to the
original author.
TwiTerra uses the Twitter API and the third-party Twittervision API to build data models of geo-located retweet trees, showing how an idea is initiated with an original tweet and
branches out as other users re-broadcast it. This information is
gathered constantly and stored in a database, which is later visualized
on a globe using a set of open-source Java libraries created by NASA.
Retweets
are broadcast to audiences that are different from the audience of the
original tweet, and this non-discriminatory message forwarding can
expose incidental recipients to content that they might not have
otherwise seen. Thus Twitter can serve to break people out of otherwise
homophilous social networks, and TwiTerra visualizes these liberations in the context of both each other and of the planet as a whole.
Why I liked it: GEO Twitter need I say more.
Gmissile
Online shooting missile game between players based on their geolocation data
Why I like it: LBS, cool, game. shoot things.
Turf Bombing
Turf Bombing is a location-based turf battle game which rewards and encourages traveling and learning about different neighborhoods.
This game requires a laptop and works anywhere in the world where there’s a wifi connection. Your laptop’s wifi connection is used to triangulate your position.
Gangs are assigned by the zip code of your home address. The goal of each gang is to gain as much territory as possible.
Territories are acquired as players plant time bombs at different locations in
physical space. If the bomb is not diffused by a local gang member in time, the bomb will explode and the territory will be turned over to the gang that planted the bomb.
There are 4 ranks within each
gang. General > Lieutenant > Sergeant > Civilians. Your rank
is determined by your share of the gang’s territory. Higher ranking
players have more power and influence.
Why I liked it: This was plain cool.
mimo
“customize your TV experience”
Mimo
is a mobile app which allows for a customizable TV viewing experience
and a means for social exchange with friends, family or groups.
Features:
Remote: TV guide
My Shows: Personal TV guide
Connect: Chat with friends, family, etc.
Why I like it: Social TV – another perfect fit for the old school cable industry to help develop.
PowerAware
A power strip that generates awareness of the user’s energy consumption
through dynamic colored lighting as well as logging the energy data to
a web application throughWi-Fi.
In
our digital lives every new gadget and tool comes with a new power plug
that is capable of silently and quietly drawing our electricity 24
hours-a-day. This has serious environmental consequences for our
society and financial consequences for the consumer who is paying for
this wasted electricity. How is a person to know which power adapters
are efficient and which are so-called power vampires? Or how much
energy playing aPlaystation 3 consumes versus a Wii?
With the powerAware
power strip, this live energy consumption data can be visualized
through the speed and color of a set of full-color LED lights that
illuminate bundles of fiber optic cable arranged in a house-plant like
form. The user can see these patterns in the corner of their eye every
day, leading to an increased awareness of the energy they consume,
hopefully leading to less energy used overall and more energy-efficient
habits, like turning off or unplugging appliances when leaving the
house.
In additional to the passive energy feedback through lighting, the user is able to analyze their usage online, as powerAware is continuously logging this energy data via WiFi
at fixed intervals to a web database. This allows for live graphs of
energy usage, as well as analysis of this data, like showing the peak
hours of the day energy is consumed. A social-networking component
could be added as well, letting users share their consumption via aFacebook
app, giving social rewards to users who have kept their energy usage
down or showed a significant decrease day-to-day or week-to-week.
Why I like it: Green… passive energy feedback through lighting
21st Century Confession Booth
http://itp.nyu.edu/shows/winter2008/21st-century-confession-booth/
21st Century Confession Booth is an intimate confession booth where you can anonymously whisper your sins for everyone to read.
21st Century Confession Booth is a peaceful place where the one can dispense the heavy burden of sins and secrets in the privacy of a quiet booth.
The booth is equipped with an analogue vintage desk microphone, a soft
cushion for kneeling, and a highly intelligent speech to text
algorithm. Visitors can anonymously confess their sins and secrets to
be broadcast immediately onto twitter.
Why I like it: Post secret twitter style for the live web, Loved the analog low tech call in option and masking of actual msg but still recognizable to the author.
ChattyTime
Communally
browse the web with your friends and provide content for your chat
partner without copying and pasting links. Use your respective
locations to enrich content. Never again will you have to type, “just
google it.”
Share
location-based info without having to disclose whereabouts. Special
characters determine what information you’d like to open right in your
friends’ browser windows. Share windows including local events,
breaking news, and even definitions.
ChattyTime is a Firefox extension built upon SamePlace, the only existing Jabber client for Firefox.
It looks for special leading characters in message content. If found,
the characters trigger a browser window to open on both the sender’s
and the receiver’s end. For instance, a message containing “=ITP” would open Google search results for ITP in your chat partner’s browser.
This
application also allows you to communally browse the Internet with your
chat partner. Clicking on a certain Google result for “ITP” would take
you, as well as your chat partner, to that page. It allows for much
richer online collaboration than is currently available.
Why I like it: Shared surf simple something that has been around the web for a while but still useful now for collaboration.
TweetMobile
A hanging mobile with mechanical birds that flutter, swoop and hum when your friends send twitter messages.
TweetMobile
is a kinetic sculpture of mechanical birds that lets you follow the
Twitter feeds of a few favorite friends without having to turn on a
computer or phone. Each bird is assigned to a particular friend (or
Twitter search term) and swoops, hums or flaps its wings when that
person sends out a tweet. This movement strips away the content of the
message and delivers something else: a sense of presence. By
translating these intangible network activities into something
physical, it reminds you that these people are out there, somewhere,
living in the world.
Of course, as nice as it is just to receive
mail, it’s the rare letter that sits around forever unopened. Your
friends use Twitter to send specific messages, so you can choose to
receive them by turning onTweetMobile’s projector.
Why I like it: Beautiful rendering and visualization around social behavior. I want it in my APT. ART first.
Plott
Stories that know where you are
Plott
is a framework for delivering rich media content specific to your
location. We are interested in exploring the relationship between
narrative and physical space, specifically investigating how animmersive
context transforms traditional narrative form. We developed on two
platforms to explore the delivery of location-specific content: the
iPhone and Google Maps’ ‘Street View’. We enlisted the iPhone for its
ability, as a mobile device, to use natural movement through physical
space as its interface – allowing for sustained narrative experience.
We leveragedGoogle’s database of compelling panoramic imagery in Street View to enable an alternative exploration of physical space online.
Why I like it: LBS media, augmenting reality with contextual narrative …. mmmmmmm
Frames
Frames portrays the collision of memory and daydreams through the lenses of different characters.
“Frames” is a video sculpture, constructed
out of wire and vellum. One projection displays moving images on
various lenses. They work together to build a narrative created from
captured daydreams. Memory will also be addressed as the video footage
will be layered with different images.
Why I like it: Nice rendering as were most of the video art and sculpture projects. The realization and rendering of the images on most of them were amazing (See pics) what was missing was connectivity to social and other web points of personal presence and video (thinking pulling loops from friends justin.tv stream or video posted to connections twitter acct being some part of the video source material.
DR. POSTURE
Sit Right or Be in Trouble!
People
unconsciously have bad postures such as crossing their legs, tilting
their body left or right, hunching their backs or hanging their bottoms
on the seat while they are sitting on chairs. Those bad postures are
bad habits which destroy balancing of people’s body system, and could
cause lots of problems on people’s spines gradually. We wanted to
develop a device that assist people sit right.
Why I like it: Quality of life.
Little Protests
Banning
websites because of their content is a very common kind of censorship
in many countries like Turkey and China. I am subverting this ban by
displaying a list of websites and their content. Also by printing the
content in an unexpected way and sending them to these countries by
various sneaky methods like using fortune cookies.
http://www.anarchicdesign.com
I
am creating a little printer and a little screen which displays a list
of banned websites from China and Turkey. It has a switch which lets
you start printing the content of these bannedwebpages . You can take
away these little papers or use one of the pen caps provided to turn it
into your little banner to use in your little protest.
Why I like it: Disruptive
Anti-Paparazzi Fashion
Interactive anti-paparazzi clutch bag.
In
response to the rise of paparazzi I’ve created an interactive clutch
bag that communicates the desire to not be photographed. When it
detects a camera flash it responds with another flash that obscures the
photo. I think it’s important for everyone to realize the worth of
their own image and to be able to protect that. The goal of
anti-paparazzi fashion is to build a two-way communication between the
photographer and subject.
Why I like it: privacy, other uses, low tech.
