Process

Interactive Floor Projection

For our final project for Physical Computing, Yin Ho and I created an interactive floor projection that seeks to activate everyday space by playing with perception.

To do this, we combined a Processing sketch of shifting floorboards with camera tracking to identify a person’s location on the sketch. This was a departure from our initial inclination to build a series of pressure sensors to lay on the floor in a grid pattern. Camera tracking allows us to project directly onto the surface of whatever space we’re working in and removes the limitations of resolution inherent in discrete sensor values.

Computer vision, as we came to realize, is quite a broad field of study and getting an accurate reading of a figure moving across an animation proved rather difficult. We considered motion tracking, color tracking, and infrared tracking before finally settling on a form of brightness tracking that was, in the end, jittery and not very accurate. So our presentation consisted of two iterations of the project: the first, pictured above, which is controlled manually with a mouse, and another that incorporates a webcam and our first attempt at computer vision.

I hope to explore this area of research further in order to develop an interactive experience suitable for deployment in public space.

Energy Informatics

The city breathes information and consumes energy. Visualizing this relationship enhances interaction with the urban environment and is the goal of this final project for Introduction to Computational Media. Developed in collaboration with the Sustainability Task Force and Facilities & Construction Management, Energy Informatics displays patterns of energy consumption across a selection of NYU residence halls.

I’m pleased with the progress made so far. It’s exciting to see this series begin to take shape. Still, there is more to be done to make this as useful and interesting as it could be. First of all, I’d like to parse the text to include date and time information. Second, it would be good if the image itself could also change in correspondence with day and night. Here is the project in its present form, along with source code.

Thanks to Dan Shiffman for providing guidance throughout the project; Tom Igoe, for connecting me with the appropriate resources; Jonah “Cecil” Scheib, Director of Energy and Sustainability for the Division of Facilities & Construction Management; and Jeremy Friedman, Project Administrator of the NYU Sustainability Task Force.

Urbanism and the Importance of Place in Media Art

Following is the abstract for my final, research paper for Recurring Concepts in Art.

The ubiquity of cellular telephones has transformed communication habits across dense urban centers. The location-aware functionality of many of these devices—via text messaging, GPS, and/or cell tower triangulation—allows individuals to navigate and experience space differently. As with other forms of urban sensing, this has implications well beyond fixing ourselves within Cartesian coordinates. For artists and designers, the medium of location brings with it both a historical context and an opportunity to add layers of meaning and experience to the urban landscape. This paper will seek to outline the development of current mapping technologies, review the work of some artists incorporating locative media into their practice, and consider possibilities for future exploration.

As an additional dimension to the research, I am recording the locations of my work on the paper here.