Intro to Phys Comp: Final Ideas

I want to get my hands dirty with interactive storytelling, so I want to create a project that allows the user to be a part of a film. An idea I have is a Car Chase Simulator. 

The user interface would be the obvious car parts: a steering wheel, a gas and brake pedal, and a gear shifter. There would also need to be a screen to display video, preferably a wide one to simulate the front windshield. The user would start the movie by starting the car. As the user controls the wheel and pedals, the movie changes to different scenes. There would be a large collection of car chase footage from famous movies, so when the user turns left, the scene would change depending on the current state of the movie.

Just thinking about the process of creating this project is giving me a slight panic attack. Although I have a good idea of how all the user inputs would work, the thought of recreating the interior of a car and collecting hundreds of car chase movie clips, and editing them, and then coding the logic... It's a lot of work! But I think it's doable with the skills I currently have. This project would combine a lot of the skills I have and are learning at ITP.

Intro to Phys Comp: Spooky Midterm

Halloween isn't scary enough these days. My partner Rogue and I wanted to create something that would shock and frighten. We created something not of this world. We created... a ghost.

AKA a silhouette of a Halloween mask that follows you around. Spooky!

Since the midterm project was to be Halloween related, I wanted to make something that would primarily be used in the dark. We ended up deciding on a device that detects a user walking along a surface, and depending on where the location the user is currently at on the surface, project a shadow at a corresponding location on the wall.

Our main component to detect the user interaction would be several FSRs embedded underneath a cardboard walkway. The input data from these FSRs are then used to light up specific blue LEDs. The LED will light up depending on which FSR the user has currently applied pressure to. The light from each LED would then cast a shadow off of a central mask, creating a silhouette on the wall.

The circuit design of this project was fairly simple, however the hard part was implementing it into something tangible that a user could use. Our project required a lot of space which was something that Rogue and I were not too accustomed to in our past physical computing projects. The most difficult part was probably the angling and positioning of the lights in order to cast a nice silhouette on the wall. Below is a short montage video that details the process of how we built this project.

Documentation for Ghost Stalk

Issues/Stuff we wish we could have done better

Rogue and I ran into a lot of issues that we had to compromise with in order to finish the project. We had originally intended for the mask to also move by using a servo motor. The motor would then move as the user walks through the cardboard path. Unfortunately, when using the Servo library in Arduino, two pins are disabled (9 and 10). This loss of real estate would not allow us to use the four LEDs, so we decided to do without the motor for now. A solution to that problem was to perhaps use another Arduino board. 

We had also originally wanted to use Red/Yellow/Orange LEDs to cast the light since it fit more with the theme. However, the silhouette created by these warmer colors were not as clear as the blue LED lights, so we had to again scrap an idea. Jeff mentioned how a stronger light source would have made the project much better and I agreed. I hope we learn how to implement stronger components to our projects in future classes.

Overall, the midterm project was an amazing learning experience for me. Being able to turn a kind of silly idea into a working prototype in such a short amount of time was something I had doubts on. But now I know I can do it! Thanks again to Rogue Fong for being a great partner. 

Intro to Comp Media: ITPness

Some guy compiled a 25k+ entry'd json of comments from pornhub content. I decided to use it in this week's assignment. It probably wasn't the best idea, but by the time I realized that, I was already too far in.

These comments were like 99% incredibly vulgar, so I first decided to clean up the language a bit by replacing certain "bad" words with a "good alternative". I used the same data structure that I used for my Morse code translation in my previous assignment. The replacing of these words reminded me of the R rated movies shown on like TNT or something and how they would have dubbed lines over swear words.

As these new translations started printing out, some of them actually reminded me of comments people would say to others for their first couple ICM assignments. So I took several ICM projects from the first week and imported them into my project (sorry, I didn't ask for permission. let me know if you want them taken down!)

Finally, I implemented it so that several users(someone from the class) would "comment" on a random p5.js sketch, simulating a live stream of comments like you would see on video streaming sites such as... YouTube. These comments are PG-ified to the best of my abilities.

After reading through hundreds of these pornhub comments, I experienced a numbness in my brain. Censorship became such a meaningless concept to me during this time of desensitization. Not sure where I'm going with this, but if you want to see the unedited versions of the comments, you can comment out "c = filterBadWord(c);" in the code. 

code here