The day 3 project I tried to describe another emotion by MAX/MSP.

This emotion is ‘Hesitance and division’.

Sometimes we often encounter some hesitant moment or situation, when we have to make some choices we might feel hesitant. It is just like that there were many ‘ourselves’ in our mind to discuss which choice we should make. Just like our shadows walked around us.

On the other hand, hesitance means division. The different ‘shadows’ of us represent different ideas or choices. So our mind is actually divided into different parts. Just like ‘division’.

I used MAX/MSP to process the video streams of my computer’s camera, to create some ‘division’ effect to describe ‘Hesitance and division’.

There was soooo many cool projects to choose from, but here are my top few:

Water Swing

Conductive Paint by Bare Conductors

Ember (kitchen arduino hack for sous vitae)

Japanimo (3d object sensor)

Not quite an interface, but extra bonus:

Most Awesome 3-D printer!!! Prints resins, silicates, metals, enamels etc and CHOCOLATE! CHEESE! COOKIES! and therefore, more cool than any other 3-d printer.

3 projects that I most interested in:

One is: https://www.sifteo.com/

SIFTEO

Many people were interested in this thing. Especially, children. At first sight, I thought it was a iPod Shuffle as the design and size. With physical touch, you can combine two or three, actually, there were 6 electronic boxes as a group, to combine them together to extend the limited screen as the screen was really small. The aspect is really cute. But I am considering about the prize, I just checked SIFTEO website, the pre-order price is $149. To be honest, I wonder that it is a little bit expensive, coz many people have iPhones, people can play the same games with their iPhones.

One is: Sining Fish Car

This project was really funny, and it was the first thing I caught in Maker Faire. At first, all the fishes and lobsters were singing, but they didn’t move, in the end, they gave the final poses, they twisted their bodies, and opened their mouths. They scared me, but made me laugh.

One is : Running Robot （ I forgot the name…)

It reminded me another LEGO toy I met in Chicago.

They are quite different in size and looking. The same part is they were both used LOGO to made the body.

The robot in Maker Faire was an Arduino Robot. I may focus on the material of the stuff.

I also found it was hard the control the robot, the direction, the speed. It always hit the edge of the desk, it looked so poor.

This robot sent repeated IR beams and received them back, on the basis of which it calculated its next move. Hence, always staying on the path (the path being pre-drawn on the ground below it)

Still Pretend to be a fish. You know look through fish eye lens can give a quite different world.

Home-made Fish Eye Len camera:

Limited Leopard grain fish eye len camera.

Setp.18.2011 One day life of a fish

I found it was hard to focus on the right point with this fish eye len. But still had a lot fun.

I also made some mistakes of the TIME.

This system used a chip with pre-written MIDI drum samples. The way the MIDI sounds were triggered were determined by a light sensor: while it received no light, it would play the MIDI sample. To block the light, the maker used a plastic disc and a marker. By making different patterns on the disc using the marker, you can create various combinations of drum samples. The fact that it used such a simple variable, and it integrated a visible “pattern” for drums that one could easily make for themselves was what caught my attention.

This project consists of 4 different games and a physical controller that tweaks them: A ping pong game, Super Mario, a simulation of missile commanding system and tetris. The controller is built in a way that each knob can be assigned to different taks on the basis of what setting the controller has been put in. By connecting different nodes on the controller, we can achieve for example, Mario behaviors in Tetris and vice versa.

This gaming mashup was remarkable in my opinion because in not only interfaced with the user, but the four games (Three written in processing, and one pre-written – Super Mario) themselves interfaced which each other controlled by a dynamically changing physical controller.

http://paperkettle.com

So, I’m writing this as I’m listening to the talk for the second time, and I will probably need to watch it for the third time to be able to completely grasp the critical points in this talk, but here’s what really resonated with me.

Firstly, I believe Kay’s talk evolved mainly around the notion of “Thinking outside the box” and the fact that we human beings, in general create constraints for ourselves, limiting our way of thinking, and then making efforts to be innovative and create complex systems inside that limited area. The analogy of “fish in the tank” and his remark on Art and how it will show us to other contexts out there that our paralyzed short-sighted minds can not normally reach illustrate the key point in his insightful talk.

His numerous comparisons between biology and how object oriented programming languages are constructed was another outline that caught my attention. His comparisons between various bio organisms with classes in OOP Languages was very remarkable: each bio organism is designed to carry out a certain task, yet when interfacing with other bio organisms, the whole system gains much more complex behaviors and functions. Just as in classes where you need not know what exactly takes places in each and every one of them, but rather by grasping the mere purpose they serve, we can have various building blocks in our disposal by means of which we can aim at constructing much more complex systems.

The “Dog House” and “Cathedral” analogy, in my opinion, serves the purpose of explaining efficient expandability of complex systems. As opposed to using a hundred times more material, following the blueprint of a dog house to build a cathedral, we should re-think the requirements of the task at hand (In this case being the complex system, or software). As the system grows, new structures and functionalities are required to successfully build the project.

In summary, apart from all the computational references, the main point made by Kay in this talk was the systematic thinking as a means of building systems. Designing building blocks with built in functionalities that interface efficiently with one another to make a complex, yet fully functional and responsive whole.

This inspiration is from ocean. Some kinds of fish can be fluorescent in dark, deep in ocean, coz their squama holds chemical substance. I bought ULTRA-Green/Red Phosphor online try to make something can be see in dark. I also got an idea from a night lamp( You may see the picture below).

The goal: a dancing fish in my bedroom.

Steps and annotations:

• Ultra-Green/Red Phosphor

  

• Making paper coral

  

• Put the coral on wall and color it

• Use 1phosphor+4nail polish

• Absorb light

  

• Testing

  

•  Making paper box for the LED torch

• Testing