Physical Computing Final

Fundamentals of Physical Computing with Rob Faludi

In small groups, students were asked to devise a project that would allow them to use a semester's knowledge about physical computing and building things to create an interactive experience.

• David Bellona, JoJo Glick, Erin Moore, Cooper Smith : Chutes & Spheres

  Chutes & Spheres is a game that integrates players’ physical movements with digitally generated objects to give them a fun and engaging way to pass time at the airport.

• Colleen Miller, Beatriz Vizcaino, Gene Lu, Stephanie Aaron : MindFull

  Mindfull is a fork rest that reminds you to put your fork down and chew between bites while you are eating. This device offers a way for fast eaters to be mindful of their speed, allowing the brain time to process when the stomach is becoming full. The conscious pause prevents you from racing through your meal, and allows more time to savor it.

• Kristin Breivik, Benjamin Gadbaw, Adjoa Opoku, Allison Shaw : Personified Chair

  Our goal for this project was to make a chair that would remind the user to take breaks when working. By giving the chair a voice, it would interrupt the user once in a while with some funny line that would change based on how long the user had been sitting in the chair.

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• Christopher Cannon, Sarah Koo, Tina Ye, Catherine Young : Pillow Fight Club

  Pillow Fight Club integrates physical computing with a real pillow fight to encourage the par ticipants’ fighting spirits. Specially engineered pillows are outfitted with accelerometers to detect their motion. These communicate with a computer via XBee radios. Participants are rewarded with a variety of visual and auditory feedback.

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• Russ Maschmeyer, Eric St. Onge, Derek Chan : Tarot Trunk

  

  This final group project culminated in tying together Arduino, Twitter, and the engaging mystical experience of communing with “the beyond.” It’s an automatic fortune teller, with a twist. Using a variety of sensors and an Ethernet connection, Tarot Trunk takes physical input from a dial and some tarot cards drawn by the patron. The crystal ball pulses when all is ready for “communing.” Behind the scenes, a patron’s fortune request is sent to Twitter in the form of a tweet, pooling the Twitterverse for a reply. The first tweet gathered is then sent back to the trunk where it is printed as a fortune for the patron.

• Carrie Stiens, Michael Yap, Katy Newton : The Operator

  

  Creatives have a commitment to integrity in their work; Simultaneously they are constrained by the pressures of time and project demands. In the SVA IxD Studio this situation is amplified by the nature and intensity of the program.

  The phone was built as an outlet for creatives to escape a problem space and connect with outside inspiration. The phone is a living artifact within the studio. By making a call, students and faculty hear the voice and personal creative strategy of a creative that exists outside of their problem space.

• Angela Huang, Jeff Kirsch, John Finley : Touchstone

  The Touchstone is a project that allows users to exchange a touch at a distance. For our final presentation, we built a pair of devices that communicated wirelessly across a room. In further iterations, the Touchstone will use an internet relay to allow a pair of devices to communicate from anywhere in the world.

  Whether just across town, or somewhere on the other side of the world, everyone in our studio has someone they care about deeply but see considerably less than they’d like. A number of mechanisms exist for sending composed messages to these people, in phone calls, emails, IMs, text messages, etc. But what about simply communicating “Thinking about you,” without the added overhead of words? The deceptively simple way a touch communicates that sentiment was the genesis of our Distant Touch concept, which evolved into the Touchstone.