Daily Archives: 19 Feb 2014

Chanamon Ratanalert

19 Feb 2014

Interaction

1. Radio
In my spare time, I like to not-creepily stalk CMU students’ online design portfolios. One that I came across quite a while ago but has always remained in my mind is RADIO by current senior in industrial design, Ethan Frier (I don’t know him… let’s just leave it at that). In this project, he created tangible plaster forms of 5 radio stations: jazz, NPR, pop, freeform, and rock. These tangible stations are shaped differently to represent the radio station. The user takes a station form and puts it onto a dock, which registers the station through RFID tagging. The user can then move the form up and down the dock to control volume.
What could be improved is the solidity of putting in a plaster form. I feel like the audio beep is satisfying, but a physical form of click to go along with the physical aspect of the station would be a more gratifying experience.
I really appreciate this project because it required multiple levels of interaction. Moving a piece up and down to control volume is one thing, but to create separate, physical pieces to represent radio stations another. I like that the full interaction experience of changing and adjusting a radio station is created in this project.

2. Your line or mine – Crowd-sourced animations at the Stedelijk Musem

This interactive exhibit has pieces of paper with varying dots on them. People come along and draw lines, shapes, etc. that connect these dots. They then scan the page and see their creation combined with others’ on a large screen, progressing as the dots move and the pictures change. What I like about this exhibit is that it is not interacting with the art itself, but with others. Not only are you able to play around with the project, but you contribute to it. Additionally, I like how it’s more complex than it seems. In each video of the collection of people’s drawings, you can see there is great variance between what people drew. Connecting the dots is something we did as children before we knew how to draw, but this project takes it to a higher level and pushes thought through it. You can see people in the video really considering what they want to put to the page; what they want to contribute to the project. This project offered a guide for people to connect, but offered great opportunity to be creative and for people to do whatever they wanted.

3. Radiohead: Polyfauna – An immersive, expansive world of primitive life

Described as “a living, breathing, growing touchscreen environment, born from abstraction of the studio sessions from King of Limbs and the organic drawings of Stanley Donwood,” this project kind of creeps me out. It is an iPad app that moves in 3-d motion space and consists of environment scenery, sound, and touch interactions by the user. It’s hard to explain what it is, mostly because I don’t quite understand it (it’s that creepy), so take a look at the video yourself. I like this project because it combines multiple features: motion interaction (moving the iPad around moves the scenery around), visual environments, and audio. I wish this project were a little less abstract so I could understand why changes in the environment occur, but I guess that’s part of their abstract audio-connection visualization they were going for.

Haris Usmani

19 Feb 2014

MirrorFugue

By Xiao Xiao

This project explores music collaboration across space and time, communicating through sound and gestures. The system has two modes: “Reflection” and “Organ”. In reflection mode, the player can see and hear what is being played in the reflection of the keys while in organ mode, the virtual player’s hand appear as projected hands on the keys themselves. Anyone can be the virtual player, you could even play with yourself or collaborate with another miles away. I personally liked the project as it preserves the aesthetics of the instrument while enhancing interaction between the two worlds (the real-time and the virtual) by sound and vision. Xiao used MIDI keyboards, wide-angle cameras, projectors and MAX/MSP to build the prototype.

 

“The Treachery of Sanctuary”


by Chris Milk

This is an art installation that consists of three panels that represent the process of creative inception. The artist who conceptualized the project was very close to the idea of how birds live (in fact he mentions he lives on the beach!), and so he used the motion of birds to convey his point across. The first panel tells us about inspiration, where the individual’s shadow disintegrates into birds that fly away. The second panel presents the impossibilities- the moment where outside forces start to limit or kill the ideas we come up with; here the individual’s shadow is eaten away as birds fly towards it and snatch a part away. In the third panel, the individual learns how to make the idea work- its where ‘you and the idea transcend’. The individuals shadow appears to grow wings in this stage. It’s made possible using Kinect to detect the person and interact with his body motion. What moved me most about it was how people reacted to the installation- skip to the last few minutes of the video to see the gestures and emotions people show.

 

Voice Spray

By Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

This is a sound art installation where the participants can come in and speak into the intercom. Their voices are converted into flashes of light, and a unique pattern of blinking lights is generated which traverses over the light array. Near the end of the audio, the participant can hear chunks of the last 288 recordings made on the device, so this project keeps accumulating the last 288 recordings done on it.