Dynamic Ground is a kinetic floor developed by Adam Lassy and Adi Marom for NYU's ITP Winter Show. Each interconnected hexagon is operated by a central motor connected to a light censor. When someone walks on the platform and covers the sensor, the design underneath either expands or contracts, depending on its resting state. It's not walking on sunshine so much as stepping on snowflakes. [ITP Winter Show]

However, it looks more dorkbot than terminator in the harsh light of, um, light. [Blindsight, Andrew Styer at ITP]

Each person playing the game wears a headset, speaking the lines onscreen like a member of the Enola Gay's crew as it progresses. At the end, it plays back a recording of everyone, so you hear it in your own voice.

I suppose that's as close you'd want to get to the experience of ending, saving and changing millions of lives in an instant. [Hidezaku Furuya ITP]

[Che-Wei Wang at ITP]

What the robot's doing only looks random—it's actually based on a reference image or video. Sadly, Jackoon was the only ArtBot of Oscar's on display when we dropped by, not his almost-creepy Theo Jansen-inspired designs. [ITP, ArtBots]

You have to inject the perfumes into the ring with a hypodermic needle which is supposed to invoke the "clinical process" of getting ready for a date. The scent is released when you squeeze the side, causing the tiny piezo tubes to contract.

Oh, the feather's just for decoration—I'm not sure it'll help you get laid, either.[Art and Program, NYU ITP]

If you're in NY, you should go! You missed it today, but you can go tomorrow from 5PM to 9PM. It's right here, 4th floor:


View Larger Map[ITP]

Check out each photo's caption for more on these great projects:

And be sure to see our other posts from this year's semester-ending classes:

• ReedBox Recreates Eno's Bloom iPhone App With Magnets

• Channel Jackson Pollock's Drunken Splatters With a Wiimote

• Accelerometer Headphones Control Music Via Headbanging

• 120 Feet of Video Art: Final Exams at NYU's Big Screens Class

[ITP]

ITP students Si Heun Cho and Ruxy Staicut created the rig you see here that takes IR and accelerometer data from a wiimote to plot a point in relation to a dropcloth on the floor—your canvas—and projects a nice paint splatter trail. A nearby kiosk can be used to control the color with three RGB dials, and a printer is standing by to make permanent your creation. I tried to spell Gizmodo for a second, but then realized that ol' JP would totally not be down with such concreteness. [DraWiing Jackson Pollack - ITP Winter 2008]

Lee-Sean Huang attached the accelerometer to the top of the headband, and fed its data readings into the visual audio programming platform Max/MSP to control the sound output based on where your head is at, so to speak. But unlike the horribly bad mushroom trip that you could not escape from after listening to Massive Attack, all it takes to change things up—in this case, shifting in and out between various synth samples to make a live mix—is to bob your head. It's not for switching tracks on your iPod, think of it as more of a crossfader that works not just in one dimension (left and right) but in 3D space, blending various elements of a track in real time.

Accelerometers are in everything, so adding them to consumer headphones would be the easy part. Coming up with a novel way to utilize the sensor readings to change the sound, now that's the trick. I told Lee-Sean he should hook up the guy from the Boredoms with a pair—I think he'd love them.

To try to build one yourself, Lee-Sean's Max/MSP source code is available on his site. [ITP Winter 2008]

Yes, it is final exam time for Shiffman's Big Screens Class—at 6PM on a Friday night, with free wine—and I am standing with a couple hundred other likeminded art techies in the lobby of the IAC Building, a curvy glass Frank Gehry creation on the West Side of Manhattan. We are in front of a 120-foot screen that's the equivalent of six 16:9 displays arranged end-to-end, and we are doing what it's telling us to do. We are obeying it.

It tells us to clap, and we clap. Then we stomp our feet and say "la la la." Then we send text messages to it, filled with the anticipation of influencing what appears on its glowing greatness. We clap to shoo white birds off a power line that's strung across its great length. We do it while drinking and taking pictures of the action, and it is good—a techie church for bigger screens, always bigger! We kneel!

Shiffman and his students have the IAC people, in part, to thank for their classroom. Rather than put in a garden or expansive, empty lobby, Barry Diller's IAC conglomerate—which owns several web-related businesses like Ask.com, Ticketmaster, etc—decided to build one of the world's biggest indoor video walls. It's made up of 27 vertically oriented projectors, linked into a single display by software from Spyder and shined onto a translucent screen to create a massive projection image:

For the Big Screens class, the wall is powered by three dual-head Mac Pros, each driving their own pair of 16:9 aspect-ratio screens (splitting nine projectors for each head), for a total resolution of 8160 x 768 pixels.

The class is part of of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), a two-year graduate degree they've offered since 1979 and the source of all kinds of geeky curiosities. Shiffman, a wizard of the graphical programming language called Processing that many of the students use to fill up the screen (a few others use openFrameworks, another visual language) has taught this class for two years now. Processing has been used in tons of music videos, data visualizations and interactive video art and is popular for its relative simplicity as a way to turn code into amazing visuals.

Talking to the students, it's apparent that such a unique medium can barely be classified as a "screen" in the traditional sense. The immense size, when paired with such an extreme aspect ratio, turns the screen into more of a physical space than anything resembling a TV (even one that's 150-inches). Besides, it's not about resolution, in the home-theater sense. Sure, you can do a lot with 6 million pixels, but it's not why you come to see this 120-foot screen.

Interaction is the key, as you can see in the following videos. Mooshir Vahanvati created a massive 120-foot stretch of powerline with birds who perch when it's quiet and scatter when microphones pick up a loud noise:

Vikram Tank created a six-panel conductor that synced up the crowd's claps, snaps and la-la-las:

Matt Parker's "Caves of Wonder" took a video feed of the crowd from an IP camera and twisted it into a craggy landscape with Processing—part iTunes Visualizer, part Grand Canyon on Mars:

And Alejandro Abreu Theresa Ling combined silohouettes on screen with the shadows of real actors behind the screen to create three vignettes of Chelsea's seedier past:

Shiffman works the controls at the back of the room with a gigantic smile; he is perhaps the only person that could teach this class. He's the primary author of the "Most Pixels Ever" library for Processing, which allows projects to sync up across multiple displays seamlessly without delays—and not just your dual-head monitor. Most Pixels Ever is amazing because it can handle the 6 million pixels of IAC's video wall without blinking, and without it, this class would not exist in its current form. All the art-tech nerds thank him as we file out the door.

"For the students it's just such a completely unique experience—it's unique for anybody, whether you're a grad student or a professional designer. Few people in the world have a chance to work on anything of this scale, and what's great is that I can say to them you can do whatever you want," he says. "You learn a ton about technically producing the work, and also what it means visually to work on that scale."

"I can't imagine that when IAC build that wall that they imagined performances on it with actors casting shadows behind the screen, so that's fantastic."

The rest of ITP's classes are having their semester-ending show this week in NYC; find out more here and look for our coverage starting later this week. [ITP on the Big Screen]

Each of the four ropes you see controls a different looped sample: drums on my left hand, keys on my right, with electronic bass and some kind of FX thing rounding it out. As you see, when I rock it solo—my giddy look notwithstanding—it just sounds damn good, but when the inventor himself joins in, it's better still. Pedals on the floor restart each loop, so that you can tap it into place.

This is just one component of Michael's Lost/Found project—in the video you can see another pulley contraption he uses to draw circles, creating literal "feedback loops" of sound. Chladil's goal is not to make the next Soloflex, but to help non musicians access music making in a more natural, gestural way. For better or worse, that's also the goal of the inventors of the Beamz laser lute. Fortunately for Chladil, not all appendages can be used to tug ropes (last we checked). [Ropeandpulley.com]

The Teste Touch's built-in temperature sensor lets it respond to heat like real testicles; when it's cold, the balls shrivel up like George Costanza's, and when it's warm, they look like something you'd find in a JCC steam room. When tickled or touched, the sac moves and giggles, and while this may not be totally accurate, it is entertaining.

Jason Krugman, Stella Kim, and Ben Chao, the three students who masterminded the whimsical Teste Touch, kept it pube-free on purpose; they wanted the balls to be friendly and huggable, and not, you know, gross or anything.
[TesteTouch]

The experience is so immersive you forget that it's not real—no wonder real pinball is on the endangered-species list. The virtual kind gives you different types of play, four in fact:
• Cooperative, where you have two paddles on your side and one on your partner's side, and you both share a score
• Synchronized, where both sides tap the buttons simultaneously to make the paddles swing fully, so you lose if your partner doesn't help
• Competitive, straight-up pinballin'
• Multiball! You'll see this one at the end of the video, a total clusterfuck with balls flying everywhere

I give Daniel bonus points for cool virtual realism: The actual wooden playing board peaks in the middle, sloping downward. The virtual balls react to this, slowing as they roll uphill to the middle, then speeding up as they roll towards either end.

It was so much fun I almost forgot to ask what the point was. Daniel says that in the age of Wii, it's important to study interaction of players who are not necessarily competitors. Also, he likes to observe how mechanics affect gameplay. We couldn't get Daniel to admit he was merely trying to come up with a great game to sell to bars, but hell if he didn't invent that too. [Moving Parts; ITP]

Basically, you can recommend a show to any (or all) of your friends on your list, and it'll simply pop up in their friends channel. It also works to some extent like a Flickr pool, so you check out what your friends have been watching.

The other Flickr/YouTube-like feature is the ability to tag shows, which is potentially extremely cool and incredibly useful, more so than automated recommendations. I just wonder how long it would take for every show to be tagged "09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0." Video demo after the jump.

Ambient TV [Project Page]

In English, that means if Ethiopia is mentioned 30 times, Kenya 20 and Colombia 50, your brew would be 30 percent Ethiopian, and so on. (You could, of course, fill the respective canisters with all the same bean to make a standard cup, but where's the fun in that?)

On top of flaunting the ever-popular steampunk look, it grinds the coffee fresh before it brews, so you don't need a separate grinder. The only downside is that it's drip—he told me he thought about French press, but the mechanics didn't work out. It still made a pretty damn good cup at the show, though. – Matt Buchanan

News Brews [Project Page]
NYU ITP 2007 [Gizmodo]