Trends in Tech and Other Highlights from ITP’s 2013 Winter Show

This past Sunday and Monday was the annual Winter Show at NYU’s Interactive Technology Program, or ITP. The program has long been a hotbed for maker culture, from Daniel Rozin’s permanently installed Wooden Mirror in the lobby of ITP’s 4th floor that continues to wow first-time visitors to the school, to students grouping together to compete in competitions that could change the way payphones are interacted with in a city of nearly 9 million.

Always a boisterous affair, the Winter Show is an opportunity to engage with projects and apps that touch on everything from congressional budgets to puppetry, from NYC borough-centric social issues to party-centric installations of audio-visual technology.

The event takes place over an entire floor in the south wing at 721 Broadway in NYC. There are a couple tight corridors, a few ideal spaces for projectors, a few labs with glass walls and locked doors that no doubt get crammed with hardware in the hours before opening as they clear the floor for many hundred spectators. That is to say over the years they’ve gotten good at learning the flow within their own territory and as the title of the program would imply, interaction is key.

Below is a slideshow of some of the projects that I personally took notice of. In previous years the Arduino was more front-and-center, almost as if students were still having to introduce the public to what a microcontroller was and how it operated. This time around the tech was increasingly “under the hood” and discrete, and it was more about the effect or function of the circuit rather than how the circuit was designed. The other trend I recognized can only be described as a translation of data to the physical; so that instead of simply aggregating data and displaying it visually in chart/graph form or interactive tables, there was a move towards physically representing that data somehow. Increasing access to 3D printers (and other tools) no doubt made this a slight trend. And lastly, puppets! It seems like there’s always a puppet project at ITP, and for that I am thankful.

The “Percussion Kitchen,” an interactive drum project made from solenoids and kitchen utensils and equipment, by Devin Curry & Ben Gullard.

Subtle sounds: strings vibrate to fine-tuned pitches with the aid of electromagnets.

The crowd at ITP’s exhibitions are always willing to interact and participate.

Aaankit Patel talks about his project that assists users in learning how to play chess.

Simple hack: RCA plugs are affixed to the bottom of chess pieces that terminate connections in the chess board.

Each piece has an included resistor and that resistance tells the board what piece is being moved. For instance here a rook has been picked up from f6, and the available moves are shown.

Weavy “The Smart Loom” by Kristina Budelis, Danqing Wang, Pamela Liou, and Tan Ma, seeks to facilitate learning to weave. The simple push of a button operates stepper motors to automate the loom’s heddle cards.

Weavy “The Smart Loom” circuit detail.

“Echo” by Xuedi Chen.

Lots of puppets by various makers.

Puppets detail.

Interactive project that responds to answers you type in. Here the question was about how the girls prepare their granola for breakfast.

“Subway Stories” is a “storytelling installation exploring the inner-lives of commuters” by Alon Chitayat and Jeff Ong.

Similar in design to a conductor’s control box used in subway trains, this mechanism allowed users to control the speed and direction of projections on the wall.

Crowd-sourced favorite Wu-Tang lyrics by Kyle Greenberg and Sharon De La Cruz, because “somewhere Wu-Tang is playing” at all times.

Expressive DJ control booth. Facial expressions and muscle movements control playback, so smiles, winks, and twitches determine the beats you hear.

Quantified Self: the amount of liquids taken in during the month of November. “You are What You Drink” by Asli Aydin.

Quantified Self: the data collected from one month’s liquid intake. “You are What You Drink” by Asli Aydin.

Andrew Cerrito’s investigation of restaurant grade classifications, as scraped from NYC OpenData.

Live cockroaches live in 3D-printed environments, a physical display of data of restaurant grade classifications, by Andrew Cerrito.

Interactive flower bed: the plants open and close based on users clicking on the map on the computer. One can imagine this being scaled up to fill entire rooms and indoor gardens.

“Pop Pop” by Alex Coym, Sam Slover, and Steve Cordova is a “living pedestrian signal.” Look for it at a crosswalk near you.

“Origami Fabrics” by Anne-Marie Lavigne were incredibly rigid, inspired by origami folds.

Prototype of a Philips Hue lighting control system called “DOD” by Jay Zehngebot.

Guts of the “DOD” Philips Hue lighting control system prototype by Jay Zehngebot.

Glyphs on the dodecahedron correlate to the light’s “mood” emitted from the Hue bulb. Look for this project to be Kickstarted sometime in the future!

A pressing social issue in NYC: FRSK04 by Sam Lavigne & Fletcher Bach is a “fully automated Stop, Question and Frisk robot.” Unlike the real-world application, users volunteered for this interaction.