It is a working prototype made for my final project while studying at CIID. I am not releasing the software yet as we are aiming to include loci directly in an iPhone app I co-created called Flying. A big part of the app, is the ability to track one’s flights, so it would be fantastic to be able to create a loci directly from whithin Flying!

Through custom software built in Max/MSP, the user is able to select specific flights that matter to them, such as a honey moon, a summer vacation through Europe or all of their flights from a given year. To ease this process, the user can connect to Tripit or Foursquare and import their past flight data automatically.

Each loci comes with a card highlighting on a map all the airports flown to. The sculpture can be placed on this card to help visualize their travels. Additional information is displayed on the card, such as the title chosen by the user, the total distance travelled, the number of airports visited, and the number of flights taken.

The software generates a file suitable for 3D printing, so that the user can either print it themselves or use a service like Shapeways that prints for them.

Thanks to Brian Rink for being my advisor for the project and Sterling Crispin for helping me figure out some programming issues I had. And of course everyone that helped me along the way!

Rethinking home audio and understanding how and where people share music was the jumping point for creating Skube. We realized that as we are moving more towards a digital and online music listening experience, current portable music players are not adapted for this environment. And sharing music in communal spaces is neither convenient nor easy, especially when we all have such different taste in music.

The result of our exploration is Skube, a music player that allows you to discover and share music and facilitates the decision process of picking tracks when in a communal setting.

There are two modes, Playlist and Discovery. Playlist plays the tracks on your Skube, while Discovery looks for tracks similar to the ones on your Skube so you can discover new music that still fits your taste. When Skubes are connected together, they act as one player that shuffles between all the playlists. You can control the system as a whole using any Skube.

Form 

The interface is designed to be intuitive and tangible. Flipping the Skube changes the modes, tapping will play or skip songs and flipping a Skube on its front face will turn it off. The shape informs the user to the ways they are able to connect the music players together. This allows different Skubes to be in either Discovery mode or Playlist mode when connected to other players. When multiple Skubes are connected together,they act as one music player and they contribute to a global playlist that is played on all them.

We hacked a motorized fader found in audio mixing consoles to create the force feedback. If you are interested, you can read the paper. Basically, the way we achieved this is by drawing a force curve and storing the values in a table, then we send the current position of the slider through the table and extract the value to send to the motor that applies an opposing force. You can check this in action in the “How it Works” part of the video.

We programmed in Max/MSP and Arduino. For controlling the hardware, we used an Arduino-based microcontroller called Music & Motors (check the photo below on the right) developed by CIID.

This project was made by Hideaki Matsui and I (Andrew Spitz) in a class on Haptics at CIID run by Bill Verplank and David Gauthier.

We recorded a Danish person speaking the street names then split up each syllable. In true karaoke style, we placed lights above the matching syllable so that in real-time, you can see which part of the word is being spoken. When participants lift the speaker off the wall, it starts playing. We used Max/MSP and Arduino to build the installation.

Here’s a video about the process and showing WTPh in action. Enjoy!

This project was made during the Systems and Layers module at CIID and was run by Adam Greenfield and Engin Ayaz.

The music we used, is by the amazing artist Jacob Montague. The track is Lambent from the album Fly On.

#theVELUXpose is an interactive installation for VELUX set in the streets of Copenhagen. VELUX specializes in roof windows and our brief was to inspire young urban citizens to see the roof as an opportunity space and aspire to one day own a roof window. Our goal was to connect the digital generation and the VELUX brand.

As a symbol, we used the posture people have when looking through these roof windows, which is looking up at an angle of 125º. We brought this experience from the roof, down down to the streets and used Instagram as a way to get people excited and involved. It was amazing to see everyone so keen to take part. Thanks to all that did!

We put an iPhone in a box with a frame that has VELUX written on it so that it would come up as the border in the image. We hacked together a really long handsfree kit cable to be able to trigger the camera from far. The image gets synced with an iPad for participants to upload their image to Instagram with their own filter.

The video explains it all and shows it in action:

This interactive campaign was made by Kat Zorina and I (Andrew Spitz) for VELUX as a part of an industry project at CIID run by Jamie Allen.

You can check out the pictures we got during the few hours we did the installation, it’s under the instagram tag #theVELUXpose.

Here are some of our favorite:

We asked each worker to draw us a line from ‘start’ to ‘finish’, the only other information we gave them was that they had to do it according to an adjective. For example, we asked them: “Draw a spiky line”. Each worker got paid 2 U.S dollar cents.

We used Processing to programme the online drawing tool and stitch it all together for the video. Max/MSP/Jitter was used to create some pre-visualisations, run some tests and do some list processing.

This project is made by Andrew Spitz (me) and Umesh Janardhanan and was part of the Data Visualization module at CIID, run by Golan Levin. Thanks to Marcin Ignac for his help.

Interesting facts:

Average Time Spent on a Drawing:

creative Line: 55 seconds
smooth Line: 70 seconds
spiky Line: 42 seconds
straight Line: 38 seconds

Collective length of lines (about 150 participants per adjective) :

Spirally Line: 39 meters
Straight Line:  21 meters
Wild Line: 44 meters
Smooth Line: 20 meters

This picture below is from when we were figuring out the logic, geometry and most importantly trying to communicate with each other.

Haven consists of arm sleeves that collect air flow through pipes of varying lengths and materials, and a head piece that acts as an analog speaker. The wind is funneled through tubes that connect the arm sleeves to the head piece. The sounds are naturally amplified by the pipes and exit through the tunnels in the head piece and into the ears.

This was a project part of the Performative Design module at CIID. Thanks to David Gauthier and Di Mainstone for their assistance in this project. Project by Andrew Spitz, Kat Zorina and Kenneth Aleksander Robertsen.  

I recently moved to Denmark, and almost all the toilets have lfö written on them. Actually, until writing this post I thought these toilets were a brand called lfö but it turns out it’s ifö. Regardless, I present to you this Instagram series of #lfö toilets.

If you want to connect on Instagram, my username is AndrewSpitz.

There are other Instagramers getting involved, so far there is Minipagura and razsadeq. So if you come across some lfö toilets, snap and tag

Please let me know if you have any issues.

In case you fancy making crazy long files, the max size of your final sound can be 7 minutes. Also, there’s always a chance it might bomb out after you’ve been recording for days (and that would be sad), so to be safe you can export every now and then and select “continue recording” in the popup.

I love seeing/hearing what you create with it, so swing me a link if you do something! It’s really exciting to see what people get up to with my apps!

In realtime (while coding), I collect the mouse data (screen position, mouse down, mouse up), and whether or not I’m currently working or procrastinating. The white lines are when I’m working (the patcher in focus), and the red lines are when I’m procrastinating (patcher not in focus). Each dot represents a mouse down, and the brighter they are, the more clicks that have happened in that area.

The total project took 9h15m10s to code. I spent 62% of the time working on it, and 38% doing other stuff. A total of 666,207 lines of data with a timestamp were recorded and played back at superman speed.

This was part of a small afternoon project for a data visualization class at CIID, run by Golan Levin.