BioMedia: Student Projects


	Storyscape		Pulse Oximeter Mood Ring

	StoryScape is an unique urban experiment in community storytelling. From October through December of 2004, hundreds of orange stickers bearing the question "You are here... Why?" were placed throughout the greater Atlanta area, in areas such as the Georgia Tech campus, Little Five Points, and East Atlanta. In addition to stickers, posters and postcards were also distributed to increase visibility of the StoryScape movement. We invite the greater Atlanta community to share their stories with us using their cellular phones, either via SMS or voicemail. By dialing in, you will be contributing to a unique, dynamically growing collection of stories being generated by hundreds of people – discrete nodes in a network – all over the city of Atlanta. These will be stories from people in many distinct places, yet connected by a common technology and a common question. http://www.storyscape.org/		The goal of this project was to create a wearable pulse oximeter device that would provide ambient feedback about blood oxygen through color-changing jewelry. A sensor containing red and infrared LEDs and a phototransistor is placed over a finger and communicates electronically with a BASIC stamp that interprets the data and sends output signals to a pair of LEDs. The yellow light indicates a normal state over 95 percent blood oxygenation. The red light comes on when it drops below 95 percent.


	Thinking Caps		Thera-Network

	This is an experimental project to explore the realm of automated sensing of human emotions using Biofeedback, and employing it to store emotionally-tagged video memories. The project emanates from the idea of making digital life-logs of our living experiences, and emulating the human memory in storage and retrieval processes of these xperiences. For such a system to be autonomous, it has to detect the relevancy of the data being collected, and selectively use it to make interlinked databases. The project is anchored on the recent findings and applications in the fields of Affective computing (machine sensing of human emotions) and Physiological Psychology (structure and formation of the memories).		Device to assist individuals in motivation and accuracy while they are participating in their at home physical therapy sessions between office visits. The network consists of a wearable device with feedback lights and a counter (eventually), an RF connection to the therapist and a buddy network. Published paper


	Bioresponsive Typography as a catalyst for social interaction in a semi- public, public space		The Virtual Windchime Project

	"A considerable volume of work has been done in the areas of content of the written word: its semantic structure, its linguistic interconnections, its etymology and grammar. But little attention has been given to the spiritual and philosophical aspects and the physical manifestation of the letter. To date, no work in English exists regarding these latter aspects, termed akshara in Hindi. By drawing on the cultural knowledge and perspectives found in India, the letter can be viewed as an organic whole. In these traditions, the visual power and the inner strength of otherwise innocuous-looking letters (aksharas) should be felt, experienced, and realized. Bioresponsive Typography (BioType) proposes a dynamic digital representation of self through organically morphing typography. The ‘type’ responds to a person’s body state in a veritable mind-body duel in trying to understand and thus transcend the relationship between what’s apparent and what is ‘intuitive’ or hidden. The larger goal of this project is to interest people in an impromptu interactive performance in disjoint public spaces as individuals and as a collaborative group. "		The Virtual Windchime is an analogue of a real windchime that has been modified to use people as the trigger for interaction and to produce electronic sounds rather than acoustic tones. When people approach the windchime, they are detected by one of three motion detectors and become the "wind" that sets the hammer in motion. This hammer is attached to a motor that spins at varying speeds depending on the number and location of people in the room. Whenever the hammer comes in contact with one of the cylindrical chimes a unique midi-tone is generated on the attached computer. The pitch, timbre, velocity and other characteristics of the midi-tone vary as the environmental conditions around the windchime change. The impetus for this project was a desire to attribute a recognizable personality to an electronic artifact and to explore the dynamics of the human-machine interactions that such a personality would produce.


	Uplift: Enabling Latent Human Capability through Gaming		Living Universe

	Uplift, currently under development, is a game which is intended to induce the 'flow state' in the player. 'Flow', or 'the zone', is a state of cognition in which an individual can dramatically exceed his/her normal levels of performance in a given activity. The game will accomplish this in several ways: it will be highly malleable, allowing users to adapt it to create optimal conditions for themselves. It will support varying levels of visual abstraction and visual clarity, and finally it will support a biofeedback/neurofeedback interface to allow it to measure and react to the player's level of tension/relaxation.		Living Universe is an attempt to replicate a "primordial soup" condition in the form of a cellular automaton. Atoms (represented by cells) in Living Universe 'grow' and 'die' according to conventional CA rules; they also form bonds with neighbouring atoms according to their valencies, often leading to the formation of large and ramified molecular structures. More information: PDF


	Conscious camera		Geotac - Teaching blocks for the blind and visually impaired

	The work tries to represent in real-time the eye of a camera that sees only content that perceptually "matters", ie. not flat pictures, but faces, hands, and motion. It has a memory, and all that the camera has perceived will remain, on screen. The work consists of a program written in objective-C (Cocoa, with Quicktime SDK) and only requires a computer, a camera, and a screen. Videos, pictures, additional documentation: website		GEOTAC attempts to teach blind and visually impaired children about 3D geometry (Archimedean solids) in a gamelike set up. It is a building block arrangement consisting of 8 identical truncated cubical blocks, which adds on to give different spatial possibilities to the user. The geometries extend form a simple ‘cube’ to complex geometry like ‘Cuba-octahedron’. These blocks are integrated with texture and sound as an aid for the user to complete a task. These toys directly address to the need of ‘Third-Dimension’ in our user’s environment.The aforementioned goal is to make the blocks to act as tools for 3D-modeling on a computer at real time.


	Cosmic Architecture in India: the Architecture and Astronomy of Maharaja Jai Singh II		Rhinoctopus

	Cosmic Architecture in India is a recreation of medieval Indian masonry observatories in 3D space. It is a study in the application of game engines as a visualization and exploration tool for architects and designers.		Since they began in 2002, the Atlanta band rhinoctopus has been inspired to create an immersive environment for audiences to experience, one which currently consists of a live musical performance combined with the projection of static videos, which have been edited to correspond to their songs. There has always been a desire to increase the level of experiential immersion, while adding more audience interactivity and spontaneity. Allison Sall and Paige Taylor are in the process of creating a video instrument for this purpose, which, upon completion, will be used by audience members during live rhinoctopus shows to manipulate the performance video in real-time.


	Tesseract

	Tesseract reconstructs time and space to expose the long-term patterns and trends of life around us. A 10 minute movie, Tesseract begins by conveying snapshots of life around the world, then quickly accelerates to show hours, days, weeks, months, and seasons pass by in seconds. As increasingly longer periods of time are displayed, Tesseract "folds" time and space to show multiple moments of time simultaneously, inviting comparison and reflection. For example, all 7 days of a week are simultaneously displayed on the screen, enabling one to witness the patterns and trends that occur over the days of the week.Tesseract is composed entirely of images captured from publicly- accessible webcams found across the Internet and world, from newspaper printing presses, to used stereo shops in Tokyo, to fishing towns in the Faroe Islands. Project participants: Michael Terry, Grace Ou, Jaroslav Tyman More information: PDF

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