Admire: Botanicus Interacticus

Disney Research created a plant that can detect where it is being touched.

This project excites me from a more technical prospective. Capacitive sensing has been around for awhile but not in organic material. This project opened my eyes to the potential for sophisticated recording of interactions with nearly any object. This was also a nice use of machine learning techniques.

Disney Reaserach did a nice job choosing a plant. A boring office ornament gained a bit of personality in the process. I foresee creating interactions with other objects like chairs or sculpture.

Surprise: Do Not Touch

This music video was created by tracing people’s mouse pointer during a video.

This project caught me by surprise because I didn’t understand the power behind what was going on. Because each mouse pointer is a person, the video is a crowd. From this perspective the dynamics of the mice became very interesting, There were individual acts of defiance and curiosity. Mice made decisions to go up or down. What made it interesting was that as each person added their path they could see who had come before them. When the mice were asked to spread out or form a shape it was interesting to see how each person’s small independent decision summed up.

Disappointment: The Chime: Scoring The City

This project caught my attention because of its scope. The chime was designed to succinctly capture the feeling of a city block in sound. It employed 18 sensors and measured 27 variables. There was certainly enough data for a composition. However, I felt there was too much data. While the sounds were interesting I lost track of the data source. In particular the visualization in the videos focused my attention on simply trying to decipher the various blips without allowing me to see the connection to the city street. I loved the idea and the sounds are interesting. There could perhaps have just been fewer sensors so that a balance could be maintained between inputs and outputs.