Our “Wonderings” presentation went very well. I think almost everyone enjoyed our project because it was very unique, not to mention I think the introduction of just having the participants walking into a room (having no idea what they were about to see) worked quite well.

I think two things that went well was the originality of our presentation and the introduction. I think we could have improved upon our ending and of course another improvement would have been more “wonderings”

I particpated in the “Magical Box” skit as a volunteer. I was able to quite quickly guess that the part of campus they were portraying was the Drillfield. Overall it was very exciting to see other group’s projects.

I collected a large amount of “wonderings” from people around campus, family members (over the phone), and friends. Below you find a selection of these “wonderings” collected.

Wonder: Death

Wonder: Dogs Talk

Wonder: Why Doing This

Wonder: Easy to Go to Space

Wonder: Education

Wonder: Everything Free

Wonder: Grass Purple

Wonder: Fly

Wonder: Moon Made of Cheese

Wonder: No Religion

Wonder: Trick Ponies

Wonder: Sharks Had Legs

Wonder: Unicorns and Fantasy Worlds

Wonder: Virginia Tech Tropical Island

Wonder: My Tombstone

Check back tomorrow for the results of our presentation.

I wrote some basic software for my team. The software called, “The Wonder Load,” available at http://wonder.collegiatelabs.com arranges every MP3 into random folders for our presentation (this ensures that each station has a random selection of wonders all from different sources).

The "Wonder Load" logo.

The software also acts as a collaboration tool (i.e. instead of sending all of our wonders over email, we just upload our wonders to the web-app and presto — we’re done).

Next time I’ll post some “Wonder” MP3s.

Our group has changed our project idea to the “Wonder Room.” Our new project will be to record what random people wonder about on a daily basis, group these “wonderings” together, and then provide a different “wonder station” at various corners in a room with the lights turned off.

We may provide ropes or something like this to guide people through the “Wonder Room” experience.

Check back soon for the “Wonderings” that I have captured.

An artist nominated for a Grammy Award, Deadmau5, released an album for the iPhone this week. This album is of course no normal album.

A re-mixable album (via Wired).

Deadmau5’s album (or should I say application) lets you add any of his 10 quantized tracks into a semi-professional remixing engine.The remixing engine allows one to loop tracks, apply various filters, fiange tracks, and cross fade tracks together.

The application was developed Future Audio Workshop a self described “an European collective of engineers, programmers and designers.” According to Wired the company plans to apply this approach to other electronica albums.

Is this the future of music — music you control with your fingers on demand? Who knows, but I hope that this album is finacially successful so that CyberArt’s financial benefits can be brought to table of music producers.

Since sight is obviously not an option for the All Senses Except Sight Project we have to consider every other sense. Going with that theme this entry is about the sense of smell.

After spending the better part of an hour on Google I found some interesting products.

Air fresheners

A possble logo for this sketch project.

I never knew how many different air fresheners existed until I found myself starring at hundreds of different products. One interesting note is the ridiculous amount of patents which exist for air fresheners.

The first product which struck my interest was the battery powered Glade Wisp. Just the fact that the product was battery powered made it very interesting for hacking. I was so excited about the Wisp until I saw it’s $92 price tag — who would by such an expensive piece of junk?

The second product which a friend told me to look at is the Air Wick FreshMatic. This is another battery powered fragrance product, but it retails for $9.99 — not bad considering the Wisp was 10x the price.

Geeky scent products

PC Magazine has a very interesting read called “Scent Tech: 10 Devices That Smell.”

While some of the products were useless for this project (and useless for anyone — seriously who buys this stuff?). Out of the 10 products PC Magazine reviewed only one was interesting (and cheap) enough to consider, the USB Fragrance Oil Drive at $7.

Next up: touch and sound…

Good designers copy, great designers steal…

Running into Matthew Quinn

A typical children's piñata (via Wikipedia).

I ran into Matthew Quinn today (he and I worked together in CS4634: Design of Information in profiling the Sociology Department).

We bounced back and forth different approaches to the problem. His group thought that the Pinata concept (i.e. the old fashion child’s game).

Matthew Quinn and I are also working on some web design sketches for a Web 2.0 client. This is Matt and I’s first professional project together — I’m interested to see how we will tackle our design problem — and if anything from CyberArt will prove useful.

Phantom Manor in Disneyland Paris (via Wikipedia).

Ryan’s blog

Ryan (one of my colleagues in CyberArt) has some interesting concepts for the first project. All seem to relate to haunted entities: fog machines, haunted houses, spooky stories … interesting.

Wikipedia

As you have probably realized by now… I’m obsessed with Wikipedia. An article on Wikipedia, “Sense,” seems highly resourceful for this project. In addition to the five senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch) Wikipedia decided to add balance/acceleration, temperature, kinesthetic sense, and pain. I don’t think we’ll be using the human/animal sense of pain… but temperature, balance/acceleration, and kinesthetic sense could prove quite interesting.

One last resource from Wikipedia: “Answers to several questions related to senses and human feeling from curious kids.” This is a very interesting read of what children think about our senses.

Next we’ll discuss more about Sketch Project 2.

When comedy, art, and technology meet sometimes you get this rather odd combination from the BBC show ‘The Wall’.

Tomorrow I’ll resume posts related to Sketch Project 2.

Today we were assigned our second project

Description

This project is about as broad and vague as a project can be; well except for the only requirement; this project is to build/create something which involves everything but sight.

Our project

For our project our team has decided to get a cardboard box, spray paint it black, and put mystery sensory elements inside this box. One interesting piece of this project will be how to integrate taste into the projects design… we’ll see if/how this is possible.

Example

Here’s what some people try to do without sight:

The next post will relate to more ideas for the “All Senses Except Sight” project.

Description

Our final sketch project ending up being a talking gorilla (later renamed “Hug Me”). The gorilla can sing any song and say any text. We were able to wire a headphone jack into the speaker of the original annoying toy and then place that speaker into a new toy (the gorilla). The headphone jack is then inserted into the computer, which gives us almost unlimited sound capability.

Presentation

I think our project in the end went pretty well. We demoed “Hug Me” playing a rap song, and saying some text to the class. The only problem with our presentation is that the toy speaker is not extremely loud (it’s fine for personal use), but not meant to broadcast across the room. After the presentation though, a lot of people were interested in playing with the monkey.

I think the best presentation was by far the band/microwave group — they’re presentation and products turned out great.

In the end I think our project turned out pretty well.

Gorilla Audio: The Gorilla (Hug Me) Talks (recorded from WAV)