(Photo courtesy of NYU Stern)

What this means is not just a nice chunk of change to kick-start our business, but also a virtual pod and access to the Berkley Center’s network of faculty and professional experts. We’re of course thrilled, and can’t wait to get to work on our first games (as soon as we finish our theses, of course).

(Photo by Anaid Gomez Ortigoza)

We owe a million thanks to everyone at ITP who’s helped us along the course of the past year with this, especially Red Burns for giving us the opportunity to try out a wacko idea like this and see it throuh, Tom Igoe, Clay Shirky and Amit Pitaru in whose classes we developed the original prototypes, Marianne Petit and Nancy Hechinger for their amazing guidance and support, everyone who came to watch and cheer us on before and after, and the zillions of fellow students who convinced us we could actually do this.

So — much more to come!

Installations go up on April 24th and come down after the 26th, so come on by and check them out any time between then — and come see a show or catch a workshop. As they say on their site, “If you have the least bit of curiosity about electronics or electronic music, or if you’ve ever just wanted to rip your toys apart, this festival is for you.” It should be a pile of fun — hope to see you there!

Then I had the great pleasure of installing the Crickets at Conflux, and when I watched people interact with them on the street, the greatest side-effect happened: people would pause, look around, and then start to notice other things that had nothing to do with my little beeping boxes. As one passer-by noted, he could hear the cricket songs — but he was also now hearing about 20 things he’d never noticed prior as well. That, to me, was the ultimate win and was something I wanted to really focus on for my thesis.

So, the logical step was to take what worked with the crickets (small size, easy portability, relative inexpensiveness) and turn it on its side so that instead of watching you and making noise when you weren’t around, these new devices would listen to the world around them and let you know what you might be missing in a simple and calming display.

What I’m working on now are little city-embeddable sensor blocks — awareness outposts that will live in cities and report back findings in a very simple way. What I’ve started with are simple units that listen to the sound levels around them, and reflect that volume in the intensity of the light they shine. What I’m hoping to do is call attention to not only the big sound events that happen to city-dwellers every day (cabs, car horns, sirens, jackhammers, etc.) but also the more subtle or constant things (human conversations, subway rides, household machines, loud music) that do just as much to mentally and physically exhaust us but that we don’t categorize in that way at all.

So far I have a first-run prototype done up and I’ve done a bunch of user tests, and the feedback has been extremely positive. Most people initially treated the monitor like a little pet, which I didn’t count on, but works well for the concept. The first breadboarded prototype was a bit ugly, and didn’t get the message across at all — people just couldn’t relate. However, the second version is much smaller, cleaner, and easily anthropomorphizing so people formed attachments to it almost immediately. At first this worried me, but what I saw was that people would then carry it around, and after they’d gotten past speaking into the mic in baby-talk (which *everybody* did), they’d start speaking normally again and going about their previous activities.

However, every time they’d speak or a door would slam, the monitor would spike in brightness, and they’d look at me and ask if it was really that loud. Of course, the answer is yes, but we’re very good at ignoring things we hear every day. Then this “eureka!” look would come over their faces, and they’d start using the object to test other volumes — and that’s the win right there.

The platform was intentionally designed to be expandable with just a screwdriver and a cable, so the next step (currently under way) is to make breakout boards that attach under each unit — a data logger (that records to micro SD cards), an Xbee/Xport unit, a GPS unit, etc.

This is all obviously very much a work in progress, but I’ll have to present it in early May, so expect a much more thorough update in the very near future.

I’ll be presenting Socialbomb with Adam and Scott at the ETech ArtsFair, running a full game on the show floor and babbling endlessly about delocalized gaming and proximity-focused sensors, and… oh, sorry, I tend to rant. In short, it should be a blast. Going to be at ETech? Come find us and play a game!

See you there!

Photo by Joo Youn Paek.

From the flyer:

Sculpting Voice is a night of performances exploring how voice can be shaped, destroyed, orchestrated and processed to build space.

A voice is as unique as a fingerprint and speaks in both presence and absence. In an evening of performances ranging from the sublime to the
insane, performers will use human voice to shape audio, video, theater, dance and origami. Performers will include R. Luke DuBois,
Lesley Flanigan, Andrew Schneider, Joo Youn Paek, Adam Parrish, Nick Hasty, Nancy Garcia, Eric Beug, Christopher McDonald, Mike Dory, and Dafna Naphtali

Lesley and I chose to make our performance a conversation between two distinct voices: her Speaker Synth project and my bass guitar. She warmed the synth up, exhibited a range of tones, and then set up a repeating loop. I did the same, first exploring the range of the bass and then settling into a groove. The performance mutated a bit as we went back and forth, finally closing with us both fading the loops out. It came out even better than I’d have hoped, and I’m looking forward to doing so again.

Photo by Pollie Barden.

It was a beautiful evening of sounds quiet and loud, calm and energetic, usual and decidedly un. Lesley has said she’ll be doing other shows like this, which I look forward to! In the meantime, Lesley and I have agreed to do the same type of set at BENT festival, so watch for us there as well.

Pusher/Puller is a architecturally-inspired physical device for pushing and pulling sound — an interactive architecture prototype. The device is meant to both stand on its own, reacting to what it hears, and provide control over the audio environment for the users.

By pushing and pulling the points along the shape’s exterior, users will be able to change the parameters of filters, delays, buffers, etc., allowing them to “play” the sounds around them as music.

I’ve long been interested in how the sound we hear is defined by the space we’re in — so I wanted to find a way to control the space myself, and therefore change where I hear.

The Pusher/Puller made its performance debut at Exit Art for the ITP NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) Show in on December 13, 2007. Other shows are being lined up, but look for it to come out again at Monkey Town in late January.

What I’m hoping to do with this project is re-inject human contact into the stressed user’s day, triggering a phone call when too many unhappy words are typed. This phone call will feature one of several pre-recorded cheer-up messages, encouraging the user that everything is okay in the world. Additionally, by pulling the user away from the stressful situation (the computer), he or she will ideally take a moment to collect his or herself and return to work more focused and generally happier.

This project stemmed from my obsession with humanizing factors in technology, calm tech in ubiquitous computing, and frustration with typing. I ran a text logger for several weeks with the intent of making a program that would randomize my sentences, but when I saw how often I typed sad/angry/depressed/stressed words, I saw a new focus emerge. I’m hoping to be able to provide a little shot of happy for people who could really use it — myself likely included.

Also, I had the pleasure of attending this year’s MobileCampNYC2, which was an amazing day of mobile madness. I’ve done a full write-up on ye olde ITP Blog, but the vital facts are these: I love this field, there are some brilliant minds in this city, I’ve made a pile of wonderful contacts and I won a fantastic new Nokia N95 phone for co-creating an improv business concept (about remote cat-harassment). Not kidding.

More to follow about many happenings — soon!

NPR (Day to Day segment)
New York Times
BoingBoing
Gothamist
MAKE
CRAFT
Jaunted
Octopart Hardware Blog
Dorkbot NYC
The Stranger (Seattle)

This puts even more push on me to actually do a proper write-up and eventually get a how-to or kit assembled. Updates to follow!

It’s going to be interesting, demonstrating a project that’s meant to be deployed late at night for a few passers-by to a boisterous crowd during the day, so we’ll see how that works. The improvisations on the fly are better than the original ideas half the time anyway, so this may lead to some good advancements for the future.

More info here here and here, map here — come on out if you can!

And the postcard!

(Thanks a ton to Tom Jenkins and Rita Chipalkatty for their amazing eyes and design help on this — it looks GREAT.)