(2009-05-11) Itp Spring Show

I went to the ITP Spring Show (Live Event) yesterday, and took The Boys today for a brief run-through.

Of course, they were most engaged with Ant Warz http://www.virtuaz.com/antwarz/ (Computer Game: Input via LED worn on finger of each player; Swarming behavior and output driven by Processing.)

I was very intrigued by Sophies Pet, an attempt to use sensors to recognize great/prolonged slouching by a child with Autism, and Nudging her into uprightness/Engagement via vibrations. All built into a sweater. We talked a little about learning models that might allow the sweater to be worn for more than 30min at a time without causing (wearer) Burn Out.

There was a cool "light chime" where a breeze would close a subset of circuits on a large wire grid (~10x10), and the LED at each closed circuit would light up.

Interesting remote-I/O "watch" for your Mobile (was using WiFi to talk to Android)

Urban Alpinist is a Location Based Game involving achieving the highest-cumulative-altitude within a game round within a city. The interesting hack was a piece of hardware which measures barometric pressure as a proxy for altitude, outputs the "equivalent" sound frequency, which your IPhone recognizes, and reports upstream along with GPS coordinates for lat-long.

Anthony Ptak's Elusive Instrument measures capacitance changes caused by interrupting an EM field around the "instrument", and outputing that signal to drive a sound processor. He was always using a rather raw sound output to demo, so it was an ugly noise generator. It would have been interesting to hear something semi-melodic but appropriately variable. He noted that you never get the same result (hence "Elusive"), but on afterthought you could say the same thing about any acoustic instrument...

Humon is an amusing little multi-player Computer Game that takes regular phone DTMF input (your API has 5 actions).

A Simple Cup tries to use Peer Pressure to get people to use re-usable coffee cups instead of paper, with the Input being a Coaster with EtherNet, and the output being a virtual forest where good behavior makes another tree grow. It wasn't clear to me whether the coaster could really tell whether the cup placed on it was paper or reusable.

Flitt R is an amusing Story Telling idea where a theme gets presented to everyone, and a given player picks 3 photos from their personal library, which get 5sec each as a slideshow, then player records their story to be heard as the Audio for that Slide Show.

Generative Music Input via calling into a phone number with your IPhone and blowing on the mic. Reminds me of Ocarina app. But if in large group will sound be isolated from background noise?

Jack Oon is a Robot that paints to try and copy an input image. I think it would make a perfect copy, except for the time lag between when it decide to put blotch-down and when the brush actually hits the canvas, during which interval the bot is moving randomly.

Big Mouth is a Live Chat server/client that tries to throttle over-talkers by causing their words to run over each other (by moving word blocks inward at a fixed pace). Holocene-lite? See also Eugene Eric Kim:Abelard.

Floating Gallery I just didn't understand.