aram’s blog

Initially, it seemed hard to connect ‘weather’ and anything from ‘me’ whether it is personal or not. Once I decided to go with ‘personal’ direction, I managed to come up with the way to connect a possibly interesting habit of me and weather - shoes and weather.

People do care what to wear depending on the weather every day.  I don’t wear any mesh sneakers when it’s rain or snow. This simple ‘policy’ made it possible to keep all sneaker collections I’ve treasured in nice and clean shape, lasting longer than typical longevity of ‘just’ sneakers.

Map consists of three visual elements - a bottom of sole graphic for a map, weather icons on each directions, and geometric dots from the legend, that indicate each specific model of the sneakers.

From my understanding of ruleset, I tried to include as less letters as I could. I was simply afraid of letting me making a mind map, rather than a weather map.

Feedback:

1. No one asked why I named the title “Air Temperature Pattern”. The answer is, that I felt like word-playing implying “Air” is also Nike Air. Many of the sneakers I put on the legend are Nike Air Max series from late 80’s. I thought they really look like “pattern” when grouped, also have something to do with “temperature”.

2. Ramona made an important comment. I wanted to remember it exactly, so I asked her after class then I forgot what she exactly said! (a shame…) She pointed out that the way I explain the map is interesting because I sort of ‘reverse’ the reason why I discriminate certain shoes.

3. Sanjay immediately recognized almost whole thing including my intention, concept, and Nike-madness.

4. Hulya said that I didn’t seem to be a person who could collect that many shoes, never (in the elevator while we’re taking break).

5. Again, Sanjay sharply point out that he never saw me wearing some shoes in the legend - that’s true, because I also have a group of ’school sneakers’ in my mind. You won’t see me wearing all of them from the legend.

6. Alberto asked me if I cared less Asics Onitsuka Tiger Mexico 66 than any other because he found it on relatively ‘bad’ weather region. Knowing him wearing Onitsuka Tiger often, this seemed toughest question for me. I love them, but they don’t fit me well as much as Nikes do. And most importantly, weather dictates what I should wear!

thesixtyone is a browser- based game that turns music listening into an interactive adventure:

* earn experience points for finding cool music before other people do

* unlock a diverse set of achievements as you play

* level up and gain new skills to flex your influence in the community

thesixtyone is an experimental game that transforms listening to new music into a fun, massively multiplayer adventure.

Despite the incredible wave of creativity that’s happening in music, most people have a difficult time overcoming their underlying “musical inertia” — why bother with the typical tediousness of music discovery when you can fall back into the comfortable familiarity of your iTunes collection?

Tired of seeing great music fade into obscurity, we wondered if we could harness our experience designing video games to make something that could challenge music geeks and attract average people to the exciting frontiers of new music.

Since I was moved by Newtworked Cat from Tom’s book - Making Things Talk, I’ve always wanted to create something fun(ctional) thing for my beloved cat - Hani. Hani is four-years-old male cat, slightly overweighted because both of me and my wife have been too soft to spoil him. When he’s ‘talking’, that usually means more food even though he already had enough. Imagine your cat leading you to where his food jar is locked looking back couple times to check if you’re still following him - it’s almost impossible for me to turn him down feeding ‘a little bit more’ when he is being cute like that.

However, I decided to come up with something beneficial for him while we’re gone and he’s alone at home. No more excessive fat, Hani!

Parts:

• 1 Arduino Board
• 1 Bread Board
• 1 Force Sensor Register
• 1 Servo Motor
• 1 Empty plastic container
• 1 Cat food container holder

Code:

I referred the code from physcomp wiki - Servo Motor part.  My device doesn’t require complicated trimming of servo motor control, yet. This means most of codes are not edited.

Senario:

1. The cat sits on the pad which contains a force sensing register attached underneath.
2. 1 triggers a servo motor to run
3. 2 opens the hatch of food bin

The amount of the food can be controlled by adjusting servo motor’s angle.

video

To work continuously in related subject from midterm project - Tree Map, I did several graph visualization on Processing.

First, I attempt to create a simple graph with few nodes. My personal interest of movies has become the content of this graph, either movie title or name of the actor, director are shown in each node. Again, most important thing was not to show a beauty of floating text boxes, but to depict the ‘relationship’ between each word. In this example, people can see how James Cameron and his movies hatch actors who can be related to different movies.

Second images shows a ‘mess’ when dealing with a large number of data, later on these nodes+text combinations will become small sized ellipses.

Before taking a further step to utilize xml data parsing, I attempted pulling up data from my local hard drive. As a result, it shows segments of words in one of my .doc file ( I specified this file to show ‘text’ data into nodes rather than only specifying a folder. That would show a meaningless data.)

Finally, after several polishing on the visual part of the code, it shows following visualization with a kind of ‘halloween’ color scheme. It might look ‘pretty’ in a way, however, I am not fully satisfied with this result which could be meaning ‘all substance but no meaning’. This is, also, the main thing that I learn from this project. Creating data-visualizing isn’t that difficult, especially with all dynamic sources around. However, taking further step in order to make your visual more meaningful could be totally different thing. In code-wise, I know what I am lacking of- utilizing more dynamic data type. Parsing xml data would be a good example.

More refined version is the image shown below. It took me some time to figure out how to command ‘count’ to size the ellipse, and for the interaction, removing rollover and let some relatively large ellipses with more word frequency stay as they are when applet running.

aram_simonstabs_3

This game will have two players with two monitors in center facing each player. One player starts game by stabbing the space between fingers at any sequence, then ‘challenger’ should mimic the sequence exactly. In case any mistake was made by the challenger, game will be over.

That’s it. Simple, but rather than ‘following’ the typical rule of five finger fillet, players can create their own rule in very similar way of playing Simon Game. In Simon Game, player should ‘remember’ the sequence of four different colored buttons highlighted and replay it. As number goes higher, the player will have trouble remembering all sequence then make a mistake, game is over.

In fabrication, main platform will be made of wood to create a ‘table’ (this is because knife-skill is played on either a chopping mat or table(like Bishop in Alien2), copper mat will be placed for making scoring areas, Ipac+USB to create keyboard output.

1) What are the three big problems that you expect to have during the production? How will they affect your timeline schedule? How do you intend on solving them up-front?

• Flash! Although what I am planning to build in Flash seems ’simple’, I expect that completing Flash movie files will be the most time-consuming work among others. Therefore, I should put more hours to figure out two-interface for two-players and more complicated scoring system in Flash first, then move to fabricate the whole platform
• Difficulty to trouble-shoot any coding issues - posting them and asking helps fast
• Tendency to get stuck in fabrication - smart way of time-budgeting required

2) Which hardware does your project require? Do you have it all at hand? If not, complete an order of the equipment by next class.

• Wood plate/ Copper Tape(prepared)/ Wires(assorted)/ Ipac(prepared)/Push Buttons(Ordered for testing)
• Two monitors/Two desktops - Exhibition setting (will be requested to admi

3) Provide a timeline of milestones to be acomplish each week, on these dates:

April 1: I missed this class due to my sickness.

April 15: At least one platform for one player should be done in prototyping quality.

Though I came up with how to make the static mouse interaction more dynamic, I wanted to go a little further with ‘video -tracking’. Copying the code that manipulate mouse cursor interaction from last scratch with Vitamin Water bottles image wasn’t difficult, however, the video showed lots of noise which I thought unnecessary. I called my classmate who’s fluent with coding for help to eliminate noise, and he made it. Results are shown below:

As the prototype did, this application initially makes the captured image grayscale, then mouse cursor reveals a kind of ‘curtain’ effect with colorized part of the image.

If your cursor positioned anywhere around top of the screen, it will show black background like above. This effect is basically from Dan’s sample code- grab and brighten.

I changed my direction to finalize ‘fivefingerfillet’ game for my final and possibly ITP spring show exhibition after 15 minutes meeting with Amit. In order to enhance current piece of work, it appears to be challenging to create more ‘playful’ interface with simple-minded approach - make it ’six-button game’.

I’ve been skeptical of having knife thing even if it’s not harmful, finally decided to get rid of it. Instead of knife, I came up with ‘legs’ mounted on the whole body of system, then each leg would be moving up and down when player presses push buttons on top. They will still can provide similar feeling of ‘knife’ stabbing from top, but only with sound and movement.

One important rule about scoring is not just pressing different buttons fast, but pressing combinations of two buttons fast. For example, each space between fingers could be named as numbers from 1 to 6, then 1-6, 1-5, 1-4… will be the scoring combo.

Also this game will be connected to video of ‘bishop shows his knife skill’ part from the movie Alien2. Seeing the movie clip, players will be encouraged to produce faster speed to make Bill Paxton scream.
Read the rest of this entry »

A graph is a collection of elements, usually called nodes, linked together by edges(sometimes called brances). It is a common structure for mapping connections of many related elements. This is partly because the visual representation of a network shows the sort of connectedness that makes sense to someone familiar with the data, whether as a free-form map of associations written out on paper (sometimes called a mind map). - From Visualizing Data by Ben Fry

I decided to show a collection of words by using of “Mind Map” type of graph layout. What I will propose is not a big leap from the quote from the book above, but I believe it’d be a good ‘review’ of this semester doing next steps of data visualization that I have done this midterm - Tree Map.

Contents that I am going to use are up in the air for now, mainly because I want to focus more on the structure of how each element relate each other(e.g. nodes) on either Eclipse or Processing. However, after I presented overall concept, plan and thoughts for my final, Dan gave me a good ‘tip’ and examples of what could be the good ‘contents’ that fill the mind map - participatory platform of collective thoughts(or soul) from audiences. Similar to many mind-mapping software, mine could have blank area that user can fill whatever word that strikes his mind, keep gathering them, and finally shows them in networked map with minimal graphic touch on

Thanks to Maria, my classmate of A2Z, now I have a little sense of analyzing codes samples that I will need.

Inspiration and related links are below.

simple graph demo

Maria’s midterm