My Journey at ITP NYU
This is a prototype for a riddle
Background
You are trapped and you need to open a door that is locked. There is a padlock with four numbers There are four numbers in the combination lock.
Riddle
Wait until I cool before you cut me
So many fingers it goes up to infinity
The letters of which you need less than three
The most important one being the letter T
Long-distance relationships are difficult. Below is a UX analysis of people who are undergoing long-distance romantic relationships.
Document Link
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tusQs3Xx5Ki55_bh7S9FX4cTa8PlazzqzunKysZDYqk/edit?usp=sharing
This is a pattern recognition puzzle prototype.
Background
For the purposes of this puzzle, assume the player is to open a suitcase that is locked. There are four numbers in the combination lock. The player must extract the combination from the poem below.
Poem
Blank is the state of my mind
Blank is tomorrow’s headline
Blank is the air we breathe
Regardless I fancy a sneeze
Fear is the worst enemy
Remedy of peanut butter and jelly
For control the ultimate illusion
Nothing more than just a human
Tomorrow I will never know
Tonight we’ll make it a show
Slivers of hope, together, never apart
It resides here, at the depths of my heart
Final Idea Brainstorm
For my final, I’m considering doing something along the lines of documenting and mapping the racial distribution of businesses in Sunset Park. Sunset Park is a neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY with a relatively diverse racial composition mostly split between Hispanic and Asian families.
Sunset Park has an interesting dynamic. There is a wide range of ethnic businesses starting from Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Guatemalan, Peruvian, Mexican, Columbian, Jewish, African-American, to even Egyptian businesses.
What is considered as an ethnic business?
For the purposes of this class, I will be examining businesses that target specific demographics, apparent by signage, identity, types of businesses that are offered, value propositions they propose, and other indicators.
Throughout this class, I will be collaborating with Max. He will map ethnic businesses in Williamsburg. We will then analyze the two neighborhoods and identify possible correlations between racial composition and the availability of ethnic businesses.
Data Documentation
Even before the COVID-19 global pandemic, people have been having trouble making emotional connections with each other if they are physically apart. This is true of long-distance romantic relationships, people wanting to stay in touch with families and friends who live abroad, and even people who do remote work on a daily basis.
Some statistics:
The issue with establishing and keeping connections remotely is that it requires a high amount of effort to accomplish. Even with the ubiquity of VoIP and video calls, people still have to jump through hoops to connect with someone far away.
I personally have been and currently am facing this difficulty as an international student living in New York. A few of the pain points are listed below:
This work is done through the collaboration of Martin Martin, Helen Zegarra, and Candy Yang.
The original goal of this class for me personally was to build an escape room that is fun and physical. Due to the fact that pretty much all of us are constrained to our apartments, we’ve decided that we want to build a single-player unsupervised online experience without a game master instead. This will enable the experience to exist permanently on the internet and practically anyone with a stable internet connection and a web browser can access it.
We brainstormed together and fell in love with the idea of having a narrative story that involves the use of an unreliable narrator. We think that this plot tool can be used to add suspense and excitement while playing. This is important to us because not having the user physically present at the site will create a situation where the user can easily give up on playing the game. However, after reading some material and having a discussion about it, we realize that putting too many red herrings in the plot tends to be offputting to the players.
So far, we’ve come up with this storyline:
Some more notes are available in this google drive link
So I own a 15in MacBook Pro with the polarizing touch bar. Some people love it, some people (myself included) hate it with a passion. The lack of tactile controls results in so many accidental touches, and if you are in the terminal a lot (which I am), the lack of a tactile escape key is simply unsatisfying. Thankfully Apple fixed the escape key in the new iteration of the MacBook Pro, but sadly I am but a poor grad student and managing money is a key aspect of my life now.
The Project
This project is for the creation of a tactile touch bar replacement. It keeps the functionality of my current touch bar, with a tactile feel.
Parts List
Some Links
The Computational Process
I utilized the Arduino HID Project to create this touch bar. The library allows the Arduino MKR 1010 to act as a USB keyboard. I simply tell it to send a certain keycode and the computer will act as if a certain key is pressed on the keyboard.
The difficulty I faced when I was developing this was to find the right keycode for the things that I want. Some of them are documented, whilst some are not. To do this, I wrote up a simple script that will send all of the keycodes one by one. Through this, I was able to find the keycode for turning my screen brightness up and down. However, I still wasn’t able to find the keycode to turn my keyboard backlight up and down, and the keycode to lock my screen.
On the circuit side, it’s much easier. It’s simply 12 buttons connected to the digital inputs of the Arduino. Very simple.
Some compromises I made:
The Fabrication Process
This was very difficult for me. I had the idea of creating a thin small piece the exact size of the original touch bar with a custom board inside. There were a few problems with my original idea:
After some back and forth, I landed on the decision to build it with acrylic that is cut on the laser. It has a bottom piece, middle piece, and top piece (please see pictures on the bottom of this page for more detail). Thankfully I was able to do it on “turbo mode” before the ITP facilities became unavailable.
Some compromises I made:
Project in Action
Pictures
Reflection
All in all, I am mildly happy with this project. Considering everything that is going on, I’m happy that this project works and it does not look too bad. Also, I am happy that I was able to perform the fabrication part of it before the facilities became unavailable.
Did I achieve what I wanted to achieve? Probably about 70% of it.
Did I learn new things? Yes
Is this product a product that I want to use every day? No
Can this product be iterated upon into something I’ll want to use every day? Yes
The Project
A device that records environmental data over time and send it to an online database.
Parts
How it Works
The entire device runs on the Raspberry Pi Zero W. The display and sensor are passed through the GPIO pins of the Pi. I used cron job to run a node.js script that records the temperature every 5 minutes and sends it to the server.
Some Things that Didn’t Work
Links
This week me and my partner Emma are making a prototype of a dating app.
The Premise
You are responding to a call to create dating experiences where couples can test how well they can communicate without using words or symbolic gestures. Is the other person a good “listener”? Do they give you room to lead? Or conversely, are they too timid and always waiting for you to take the lead?
The One Liner
We are making a color matching game where the compromise is key!
How it Works
1. The players (a pair of would-be lovers) sit across from each other with two laptops in-between them, one facing each player.
2. Each player selects a color in the color wheel presented on the laptop screen.
3. One phone will be given to the two players (to share)
4. The players hold the phone together and rotate it around to try to find their color.
5. In the ideal world, both players will be able to pick a color that is equally close to their color.
The Project
I am making a tangible controller for the Philips Hue. It’s quite a rudimentary controller, the controller will be able to turn a singular light on or off, and it can also control the brightness, hue, and saturation of the light.
How it Works Part I – The Network
In each of the Hue Bulbs, there’s a small wireless receiver that will receive signals from the Hue Hub. The Hue Hub is essentially a small web server that runs on the local network which will send in Zigbee radio requests to the bulbs. We can communicate easily with the hub by sending Http requests to it to change the state of the bulb (the API of which is very well documented here).
How it Works Part II – The Controller
For this particular project, I am utilizing an Arduino MKR 1010. I am using this particular microcontroller because of its Wifi capabilities, any other Wifi capable board or a regular board with a Wifi shield will do.
I am keeping it very simple, just three rotary encoders, with one display. Very straightforward.
Pictures
Videos
Links