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The second A/V Systems assignment was to create 30 second sonic story. This is me eating cereal.

This piece was done as a final project for the avsys class. The concept is meant to be an installation piece that reveals a dystopian vision of the future when someone walks by. The camera senses motion and plays back a high pitched distorted sound and a dark image. The frequency of the sound changes depending on where the motion is detected, this is indicated by vertical colored lines that go across the screen as one moves. The project was built with OpenFrameworks and uses SuperCollider for audio.

fr3shb0t was created as the final project for the physical computing class. It uses SpeakJet, TTS256 and PIC16F88 microprocessors and an ultrasonic rangefinder. If someone comes close to fr3shb0t, he gets excited and hits on them! He says “Hey, good looking!”

Jnx is an augmented, tactile interface for stress relief, in the form of a plush doll. The core idea of Jnx is based around the concept of squeezing something, much like stress busters, which is emulated by squeezing the dolls throat.

The look and feel of Jnx is inspired by sack puppets and voodoo dolls to add a mystical aura to the interaction. The interface emulates a voodoo doll like behavior by allowing the user to strangle it or twist it arms and legs. The doll responds to the users actions in the form of audio playback.

The first step of my talking robot project – test whether this Speakjet chip works! Strangely, I couldn’t find much help on rigging up the demo/ test mode for the chip so here it is. I used a AA battery pack to power the breadboard and an LM386N op amp to hookup an 8? speaker to get sound out of the chip. The chip circuit is the demo circuit on the Speakjet datasheet and op amp circuit is the gain=20 circuit from the op amp datasheet.

Testing the audio Wave Shield from adafruit. It took a while to get it working because strangely the USB cables I got from Staples don’t work with it. Very weird. Anyway here’s the first test with the looped audio example.

Some initial prototypes for jnx the stress doll.

Look and feel

Materials:

Implementation

4 Flex sensors, a force sensor and an RGB LED. The LED changes color depending on how much pressure is applied to the force sensor or how much the flex sensors are bent – I still need to work this out in the code. Currently, the mp3′s are triggered from the computer using Processing but eventually they will be triggered from the SD card on the Wave Shield.

Comparing and contrasting an MMORPG and a virtual community. This presentation and attached paper analyze and compare the social and other features of Runes of Magic and Facebook with a view to identify what works, what doesn’t and they could learn from each other.

Runes of Magic: An analysis of a persistent realm

Scaling a circle in processing with potentiometer through serial communication from a pic chip.

Autopsy of a toy that does an annoying chicken dance.