Courses
Experimental Media
Lightfall
{website}(Spring 2006)
lightfall is an interactive installation that seeks to recreate the experience of catching fireflies on a summer evening. Participants enter a darkened room and encounter a simulacrum of a natural landscape, filled with blinking fireflies. By catching and releasing the fireflies, participants contribute to a larger audible and visual experience that unfolds over the course of several hours.
Digital Claymation: A Tangible Interface for Keyframe Animation
{website}(Spring 2006)
We created a clay figure that acts as an input device to 3D software on a computer. By attaching accelerometers to each of the figure's body sections, we are able to measure the earth's gravitational pull, and thereby establish the orientation of the respective part. The clay figure may be used for real-time manipulations of the virtual model, as the acceleration caused by movement of the limbs is for the most part removed by filtering techniques, and the positioning stabilizes entirely as soon as the movement stops.
Shadow Box: An Interactive Educational Toy for Children
{website}(Spring 2006)
The Shadow Box is a tangible computing project that exploits visual association and auditory clues to teach children pre-reading skills. An augmentation of the wooden alphabet blocks traditionally used to teach children letter identification, the Shadow box focuses on word-object relationships, allowing children to explore the higher level concept of word recognition in a fun and engaging environment. Through the process of matching words with their visual representations, children will explore the relationship between a word and its meaning, providing the conceptual framework necessary to acquire higher level pre-reading skills leading up to phonemic awareness. By permitting children to explore reading independent of a parent or teacher, a sense of play is maintained and the benefits of constructivist learning are enhanced.
Principles of Interactive Design
Conference Locator
{website}(Spring 2006)
Sergio Goldenberg
Conference Locator is an application designed to help academics and professionals to better plan their conferences trips. Using the capabilities of an event database and a visualization using the Google Maps API, this application provides a tool that will help
users make better decisions.
Kids' Backyard Bird Watcher
{website}(Spring 2006)
The KBBW is a science class tool for 4th~ and 5th-graders' bird watching activities. Through this tool, children can practice scientific observation skills and learn about birds in their local area as well as around the world.
Population-Flow Visualizer
{website}(Spring 2006)
Aimee Rydarowski
Population-Flow is a web-based application that uses census data and the Google Maps API to illustrate the net influx and outflux of residents, county-to-county, across the United States. It is useful to anyone interested in tracking the population shifts into their community, or curious about an area to which they will be moving, and has applications in real-estate, urban planning, and politics.
Educational Applications of New Media
Mathematix
{website}(Spring 2004)
Alexander Ross
Mathematix is a tool for students in middle school and high school math classes. It allows the user to choose how a topic will be presented to him or her in terms of its mathematical context. This addresses the classroom problem of teachers with a singular teaching style using curricula with a singular focus to teach students with multiple learning styles. Furthermore, by presenting topics in numerous contexts each student can benefit by having the broader picture brought into focus. Mathematix is currently being expanded into a Masters Project.
Tangible and Responsive Media
The Body Audible: breath brings life?
{website}(Fall 2003)
Matthew Warne
the Body Audible: breath brings life? is a real time vocal instrument which alters and delays incoming audio with a modulation unit inspired by water and parameterized by the singer's body.
My goal is to explore the phenomenology of a vocal performance event. For example, by augmenting the voice with a proxy for the physical state of the performer (making the singer's body "audible") I hope to better understand the role that a performer's physical presence plays in affective and effective performance.
The modulation for this instrument is inspired by water (specifically, cascading water represented by cascading delays) in an exploration of physics based computational models for audio. Also central is the question of what makes water, voice, and media tangible. By allowing the performer to have control over what segments of sound are delayed, I hope to create a space where performers can manipulate sounds after they have been produced. I hope that this allows them to think of those sounds as more manipulable and thereby more tangible.
The Architecture of Responsive Spaces
La Regina Wassergymnastik
(Spring 2003)
Yvonne Caravia, Nina Walia
La Regina Wassergymnastik (LARWAG) lets the player enter a world where she is in control of the elements, where touch creates sound and where every step can change the environment.
See how La Regina, the queen of the Hive conjures a maelstrom of waves and bubbles with a mere gesture of her hand. See your every step send shockwaves through the once quiet water on the floor. Touch La Regina to make miracles happen.
Blur Space
Jill Coffin, Harry Smoak
Blur Space is an architectural space built from projected videos, sound and suspended panels of translucent fabric. The panels are composed of a fabric which both reflects projections and allows them to pass through. The changing light from the sudden movements of the wings of flying birds and the flash of bombs exploding creates a shifting, unstable architecture which viewers move through either physically or virtually through real time video.As soon as anyone enters the room which houses the Blur Space, their video image is projected into the space. There can be no wallflowers. Participants move through the layered architectural space, casting shadows and video projections of themselves which blur with the bomb and bird imagery.
Participants can stretch and scratch the fabric to warp images and create sounds which blend with the sounds of explosions and flapping wings projected throughout the space.People tried to catch the birds.
Interactive Narrative
Squares
Chaim Gingold
Squares is an experiment in digital comics, where an interactor can intervene in a nine panel story by placing and moving props from panel to panel. The 3 x 3 grid represents one space (a house) partitioned into 9 moments in time. Who are the inhabitants of this house and what are their stories?
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