ITP Winter Show 2008
Last Thursday I was fortunate enough to see ITP’s Winter show. It’s a great showcase from a wide spectrum of installation art, media art, and interaction design. Some projects were simply a commentary on a situation while others had some real business application. Here is a breakdown of some of the projects I was able to view:
reVerve
This project was quite interesting, they took movies and tv shows and tagged elements of the frames where the actors where fashioning purchasable products. I quizzed them a bit about their tagging process and for now it’s manual, not very scalable but you could see some real time user generated tagging going on and some business rule around X number of tags = a real product. One of the more practical projects at the event
remmbr
remmbr had a very straight forward premise: have you ever had trouble remembering an event and the details around that event? remmbr allows you to take pictures from your camera phone and have them sync to the remmbr site to help you recall what you did. Enjoyed a great bottle of wine? remmbr it for later. The project creator wanted to make it relatively private but I thought along the ambient intimacy lines some people might enjoy a public view of the stream as well.
ChattyTime
ChattyTime lets users coordinate their browsers in real time. Users opt in to the service and once connected one user can send another user a direct link right away. Need to know where the restaurant is? I’ll send you the yelp link direct to your phone. What would be really neat is if there was a collaborative aspect to it where people could see each other interact with the page.
Plott
Plott allowed users to follow an audio narrative of a city mashed up with Google’s street view. There were very interesting parts where the audio tour would mention a building and the street view would move to the object that was being described. I didn’t get to see if it was location aware too but definitely necessary to make it useful in real time.
Anti-paparazzi fashion
If you’re like me then the paparazzi follow you everywhere! No they don’t but for the top 1% of this country they may want to walk around with Anti-paparazzi fashion. Basically when a photo is being taken you lift your fashion piece up and it reflects most of the flash back to the camera man. Take that!
Chickabiddy
A therapeutic little bird that bounces around your screen as you play with a physical egg shaped object. Don’t bounce the egg to hard the bird gets mad
Wheelbug Exhibit
This little critters walk around autonomously with a few simple rules. Most of all they want the food, secondly they’d like to meet and greet each other, and lastly they’ll just meander randomly (hey they’re human!) The creator used electromagnectic fields as attractors and deterrents depending on the critter’s mood. In the end they usually go for a massive free for all for the food.
Stars Chairs (Sit, Tap, and Rock)
Technology has really dehumanized our surroundings but this project wanted to use technology to do the opposite. Sit back and relax in the chair and depending on your movement you will get some interesting natural ambient sounds in the background. Some great therapeutic applications, although dynamism needed to be tweaked for a more natural range but the gist was there.
Dra”Wii”ng Jackson Pollock
This was kind of fun. Take a Wii remote and use the gestural motion and turn them into paint blobs. Now repeat that motion in a general way. Take a look at your screen you now have your own stochastic process Jackson Pollock.
There were a lot of great projects and the room was packed full, so it was difficult to get around to every event but what I saw I liked. Lots of great nuggets that you can pull from for inspiration, really inspires you to go back to school to remember the fun you use to have designing.