The very first projection onto the SMALLab floor at Parsons.

Couple of awesome updates. The most important is that Shawn and Kelly from ASU helped Kyle and me set up the SMALLab installation at Parsons. Very, very cool.

Distortion: Me with a checkerboard as the SMALLab team tries to fix the distortion on the fisheye lenses.

Kyle and I got processing communicating with the system in about a half hour and made a couple of nice sketches with two balls tracking. Should be a good kick off for making lessons starting two weeks from now. Here's a YouTube video of that:

I just read a great article on interfaces by Baobab's Mike McKay entitled Text Editors and Electric Kettles. It's really worth a read. It's the kind of thing I'd show to design students, it's so good. And it also does a nice job summing up some of the challenges and solutions that they're working with specifically down in Malawi. And, hey, if you have a digg account, bump the story up!

Pleech Video Capture

The Pringles Wind Turbine (a.k.a. Power Leech or Pleech) is an attempt to turn simple items found at the hardware store and elsewhere into a working low-voltage power supply. It is also the process for creating the turbine, designed so that other people may reproduce the product themselves.

Final paper pdf is attached below. The accompanying website for the instructable is here.

Here's what's new with the bear project as of yesterday:

• Roller switch installed in the chest. Giving it six hits restores normal heart rhythm in the bear.
• New "convulse" routine. The bear convulses until CPR is performed.
• Improved chest action. Two metal plates sandwich the servo, make a much more realistic breathing response. Extra stuffing and the rumbler for the heart sit on top.
• Accelerometer wired up and coded to check for the proper positioning of the bear, i.e. the bear must be laying down before CPR can be performed effectively
• Work has begun on the sounds, both the simple ones for the bear and the richer ones on the Processing interface.

We extended our haptic paddle to use three motors. The code now times the pulses between the three and randomly picks one of five points to hit. If it hits on the extreme of one side, the first motor fires, then the middle, than the one on the opposite end. The intensity reduces, too. If it's only slightly to one side, the side and middle fire at once, with reduced intensity, and then the far side fires. If the middle is the target, it fires at full intensity, then the two ends fire.

Cursory user testing has revealed some interesting results:

Hsinping Dai and I made a non-verbal dictionary for communicating about a subject in an elevator. That subject? What to do when somebody farts.

"Lot pots." Left on tables in the deli to get people involved in their tables and with each other. Each pot has a set of fortunes that require you to interact with other tables. Weird looking, but fun.

These are our presentations for the Journal Square deli project. They're huge downloads, but well worth it if you're fascinated by Jersey-City commuter dining. And, be honest, you know you are.

• First Presentation
• Second Presentation
• Third Presentation
• Final Presentation

Attached is the raw data from our deli observations. Over 600 entries. Never let it be said we aren't thorough.