The end of the semester as usual was a flurry of activity as usual, and one project which I didn’t get to cover as much as a I wanted to was my final for Understanding Networks and for Sensitive Buildings…a class I wasn’t enrolled in. The project was actually a collaboration between Sae Huhand myself for Understanding Networks, but crossed over into the Sae’s Sensitive Building class.

Sensitive Buildings is a class which focuses on creating smart habitats for city dwellers specifically those located in the apartments of 240 Central Park South New York. I teamed up with Sae, and the rest of his team in Sensitive Buildings( Annelie Berner, Manuela Donoso, and Engin Ayaz) to explore how we could make an installation in the building that would highlight the systems at work within the building. Our final project, called Flux 240 is an ambient kinetic sculpture that visualizes the changes in heat for the apartment building.

So it’s been awhile since I’ve actually posted about Printing Code(actually about a month!), but It seems as if things have really ramped up in the semester and its just the way things go that posting falls off. In any case this post serves as a redux of one of my favorite classes so far at ITP. I haven’t captured all my assignments in this post, just a few, but all of them both the code and the digital files can be found in my Printing Code Github Repo.

It’s kind of crazy to think that the semester is already approaching its end, but it is and so it goes that it’s time to start thinking about finals. For Printing code we’ll be spending the rest of the semester working on our final with the intent that more time, will produce better results. I’m excited at this chance and hope that it will turn out.

As some bounds for our final idea Rune has asked us to pick a real-world design problem and try to solve it using the techniques we’ve learned so far in the semester. After spending sometime brainstorming about what I’d like to work on, one idea seemed to bubble to the top more than the others and that idea is to design some graphical element(at the moment I’m thinking logo,badge,or poster) of the next XOXO festival. For the unfamiliar, XOXO, was festival held this last September in Portland Oregon, that was focused on bringing together independent artists who use the Internet to make a living doing what they love and the technologists building the tools that make it possible…thats a bit heady, but I believe at its essence it is much like the ethos of ITP, where the spatial adjaceny of artist and technologist create this “center for the recently possible”, and amazing things can happen. Thats not much clearer, but hopefully you get the picture.

For the final academic paper summary for Makematics I’ve chosen a paper that I actually came across before the class but never really got around to reading, called Touché: Touch and Gesture Sensing for the Real World, by the team at the Disney Research Group.

At a high level the paper is about a new method for capacitive touch sensing which enables more sensitivity and broader applications of touch sensing. As a whole the paper, is very interesting and the technology is described in a readable way. I got the sense through reading the paper that this method of capacitive touch sensing could be actually approachable in near future(with the machine learning parts obviously pre-calculated.) and gives designers a great amount of flexibility in touch applications in the future(of course the more difficult question is where is touch appropriate).

As usual I’ve tried to capture my interpretation of the paper here;

markbreneman.com/makematics/presentations/Week4/

As a side note this also ends my experimentations with different HTML5 slide-show frameworks. It’s been a great to see and try out purely web-based presentation frameworks, as opposed to the conventional Powerpoint, Keynote, InDesign software; The workflow is very different but at the same time makes so much more sense than the previously mentioned formats for a number of reasons. I’ll be posting my thoughts on the frameworks I’ve experimented with shortly.

Last week in Makematics we’ve been covering the topic of principal component analysis. Principal component analysis, is a mathmatical procedure which utilizes a dataset of possibly related data, and transformes them the dataset into a generalized linear relationships. Basically it looks at the variance between varaiables of the dataset and highlights, the variance. Wikipedia is probably more helpful, but in anycase the technique, although complicated can be useful in revealing overall trends, deviations, and orientation when applied to imagery.

For this week’s assignment I applied principal component analysis to the spinning of a yo-yo to create an interactive spinart sketch in Processing. I started the sketch off Greg’s interactive PCA code. In Greg’s sketch he uses openCV to do video stream manipulation, and then based off a reduced black and white image, performs PCA to essentially find the orientation of an object(the black in the image). After reviewing his code and playing with it for a bit I had the idea to try and use the orientation functionality as a lens to understand the rotation of object. This lead me down the path of spinart. I thought it might be interesting to try and understand the rotation of object using PCA, almost the way a stroboscope does.