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ITP Winter Show

Sun., December 17, 2006

Art collided strangely with technology at the Interactive Telecommunications Program Winter Show I attended today at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. It was a crowded exhibition of about 125 projects developed by students and professors of the program and set up like a science fair. You could stroll by and watch demos, participate in interactive projects and ask the inventors questions. There were a few hundred people in attendance, milling down the halls and into offices and classrooms where the exhibit tables were pitched. If you were a pornographer so inclined, this event would be the perfect casting opportunity for a feature film called Hot, Barely Legal Nerds.

Wooden Mirror.

As you enter the exhibit, you see a large octagonal frame containing a grid of 830 flat wooden tiles. Designed by Daniel Rozin, the Wooden Mirror is connected to a hidden video camera that captures a digital stream of what’s in front of it, interpolates the data on the fly, then activates any number of hundreds of tiny motors hidden behind the tiles, tilting them in and out of the light, resulting in a rough representation of the “reflected” image. Think of it like this: standing before the mirror, you see a crude pixilated representation of yourself. Sometimes you need to stand back and squint, but it’s there. What’s amazing is how swiftly the system reacts: wave your hand in front of the mirror and there’s a hushed sound of scattering as the tiles rearrange themselves to follow your movement.

The most practical invention was the solar swimwear developed by Andrew Schneider. It looked like armor made from a disco ball, dozens of photovoltaic strips of film stitched onto a bikini with conductive thread. On a sunny day, it harnesses enough power to charge an iPod, which can be plugged directly into the waistband. “There is no way I couldn’t do this project,” Schneider explained, and I believed him.

Solar Bikini.

One of the least-flashy exhibits but appealing to me as a writer was a program written in Java by Sai Sriskandarajah that collects the words and phrases a writer deletes when composing a document. These “lost words” can then be output as an abstract poem. I’ve always wanted a program like this!

Here’s a curious invention for the harried New York City pedestrian and commuter: Urban Sonar. Developed by Kate Hartman, Kati London and Sai Sriskandarajah, it records a user’s “personal space” as it relates to her anxiety over an extended period of time. As the team members explain:

The user wears a jacket with four ultrasonic sensors that measure her proximity to other people and objects to her left, right, front and back. The sensors communicate with a Java-enabled mobile phone, which records these four proximity values along with the user’s heartrate. The data can then be uploaded to a server for playback at a later time, allowing the user to consider, with a degree of critical distance, her spatial experience over the course of fixed period of time.

Demo output on a computer showed a stationary red dot centered onscreen representing the user, surrounded by a constantly shifting blue shape indicating the distance of the nearest object on all four sides. This could be even cooler if the output occurred in real time, like those impending-doom proximity detectors used in Alien.

Although there wasn’t enough room at the exhibition to demo it, Sonic Body Pong by Tikva Morowati was one of the funniest inventions. Based on the classic table-tennis video game, Sonic Body Pong pits two human opponents against one another in real-time. They represent the paddles and the ball exists only via a “spatially correct” sound based on where they’re standing on the court. Through headphones, each player can hear the ball approaching, hitting either paddle or banking off a “wall.” The creators displayed a video of sample gameplay, which, without the sound, was essentially two people facing off and stutter-stepping or lunging laterally. I can’t imagine this had much to do with the science but each of them wore a headpiece, presumably containing the location-tracking sensors and headphones, comprised of a hardhat topped by a large green paddle made of foam.

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