Projects
DINO Game Jam
This weekend DINO Interactive Studios hosted a game jam and interactive project creation session at the Sprout space in Somerville that spanned both Saturday and Sunday. Our jam lasted 27 hours total and had 12 participants and teams either creating new games from scratch or reworking current games and adding new features.
We had a pretty lively crowd with luckily enough string cheese and Oreos to go around. There was some LOLing with Pong on an Arduino made by Jimmie Rodgers.
An awesome Tic-Tac-Toe game made out of wood by Schuyler Towne that will have locks to pick in each turn in order to place an X or O on the board.
I made Giant Snail Take Over- a papercraft game from a Mountain Dew box and some animals and town scenes I found online as well as some motorized props. The gameplay was recorded into a stop-motion papercraft spaghetti western movie on Youtube.
Darius Kazemi reworked his turn-based strategy game and posted a movie to Youtube.
Michael Carriere and K. Adam White collaborated on a game affectionately called RAAJOCBDFOTLSOTS made in Flixel, in which you run around and jump on cars but try not to fall off the left side of the screen!
Darren Torpey demoed an early-stage game he is going to bring into Facebook to log emotions and experiences and David Ludwig demoed his Ball Game, a puzzle based game made for the iPhone that uses the accelerometer feature for a ball to reach it’s target as well as his Falling Stuff screensaver he made in Box2D.
Last but not least Fahreddın Basegmez, one of the makers of Mekanimo- a free 2D physics simulator, and his son Dennis created Cows In Space.
All in all a very productive weekend!
Giant Snail Take Over
This weekend DINO hosted a game jam and interactive project creation session that spanned both Saturday and Sunday. Typically the purpose of a game jam is for teams or lone creators to make a working project in either 24 or 48 hours. Sometimes there is a theme or things that you must incorporate into the piece you make.
Our jam was a bit more casual so I, not really knowing how to code, made a scene out of paper incorporating some creations from Cannon and Yamaha online papercraft communities. I made a short film of me playing with it stop-motion spaghetti western style with music from The Left Handed Gunfighter. I drank the give up beer after with relish.
This epic saga details the attempts of a lone defender of a town ransacked by giant snails. Will the townsfolk perish or will a savior come to the rescue? Watch and see.
Interactive Paper Art
It’s been a while since I’ve worked on this but here are two examples of a simple way to integrate LED lights into a piece of art to change the story and engage the viewer with the 2-dimensional surface of the drawing. In Robodino Bond, pressing the dinosaur’s heart causes the robot’s electronic heart to light up:
And in RIP My Love, pressing your fingers against the gravestone makes the ghost’s eyes light up with electric anger:
I’d like to explore this further and build an interactive childrens book around simple switches, buzzers and lights embedded in the art of the piece. So many wonderful projects to explore! So little time!
Ambient Text Mashup of Modest Mouse
Processing is amazing. I can’t say enough good things about an open source intuitive language built to allow *everyone* easy access to a wide array of tools and resources made for developing visual programs and interactive fun.
This weekend I took part in Music Hack Day at the Microsoft Startup Labs in Cambridge and built an audio/visual mashup of a few different libraries from Processing and music from the EchoNest. My boyfriend James helped a lot with the coding and though he had not created anything in Processing before, his knowledge of Java made it a cinch.
The visual loads the lyrics of the song and makes repeating words larger. The title and chorus words of the song throb to the beat of the music while turning red. The one we did was a demo but it could be modified to any song and have it be an interesting way to take in the artist’s message as well as listening to the melody. Oh yeah and we won an iPod Nano for it! Pretty good weekend all around.
Here’s an image taken from the visual and a link to the applet.
Levels of ’stashe
This was a fun project- the mustache man below is the main character in a game created in Processing by my friends and I over this past weekend. The basic premise to the game is that you play the role of a newspaper editor trying to maintain a balanced coverage of news stories coming through the web. Link!
Project I Feel
I’ve been working on a new way to tell stories. This abstract grouping of icons and circles is meant to visually depict in simple terms a captured moment of time from my sensory world. I hope to post more of these so that I can spot trends and develop the visual language. I’d like to make this into a larger project and link people’s individual stories together too.
…and DINO is born.
On or around April 27th, David Nunez, Aaron Waychoff and I decided to build a space to inspire people to make, do and learn.
It’s main focus is to build the community of hackers & makers in Boston and give people the support and knowledge they need to create and share their projects and ideas. We’ve teamed up with Sprout, a community science center and open studio focused on making science personal and accessible, and took over the lease on a space close to Davis Square-
And since then have painted-
And sat back-
And appreciated being a part of something great.
Perpetual Energy Device
A UV LED and a solar panel both pointed at each other and forever feeding off the other’s output.
© sci-toys.com
Battery Ring
Use the conductivity of the body to power small jewelry and have a computing base in a ring or brooch that tells the LED’s or sound generators what to do/supplies power.
Buzz Buzz
A pair of wristbands that are worn by separated loved ones that allow for the upload of a signal by xbee to buzz the other band to let the person know they are being thought of.
A Very Tiny Sound Pushpin
Lesson learned: Do not post a how to on a ’sound-generating’ pushpin before checking that it consistently generates said sound. In this case, it moves [which is nice] and makes some sound [which is nice] but when it hits something in it’s way it stops [which is not so nice]. The micro vibration motor is too tiny to withstand any additional pressure besides the flying aluminum wings, and that is a sad sad thing. Unless you have the ears of a bat, then it’s probably annoying. To have bat ears.
The Awesome Foundation
In the name of all that is glorious we bring you: The Awesome Foundation.
What is this you ask? It’s a monthly no-strings micro-grant given to people making awesome things. Period.
Who is giving away this crazy amazing free money?
- David Nunez (Dorkbot Boston)
- Reed Sturtevant (Director, Microsoft Startup Labs)
- Emily Daniels (Dorkbot Boston)
- Keith Hopper (Public Interactive Group, NPR)
- David Fisher (Web Ecology Project, Development Ninja)
- Erhardt Graeff (The Berkman Center for Internet and Society)
- Evan Burchard (Developer, Rocker)
- Tim Hwang (ROFLCon)
- Jon Pierce (Betahouse)
- Matt Blake (ROFLCon)
Why are we doing this? Because it’s awesome!!!
How do you apply? Link!
What is the smallest unit of funk?
Tonight I went to an event put on by my friend Josh Rosenstock at MassArt called the Shrine to the Funky Drummer: an experimental documentary/video mixtape/mashup he had been working on as artist in research at the Berkwick. It was a great piece and it got me thinking to create an interactive James Brown polyester suit with built-in beat. Basically you could add little pockets/sew into seams of the elbows, lapels, tails, etc. tiny motion activated sound-generators which, when you started to dance, would turn on and throw off some beats and depending how you moved, would make a super funk-inspired music piece. I think that would be awesome.
Laser Pen Conversations
Coordinate anonymous conversations with other pen holders dispersed in a public gathering by writing in the trailing light from pens on performance space walls.
Taboot
A robot that displays taboo or unacceptable behavior (ex. gives people the finger, burps, farts, shrieks, rubs it in your face if something bad happens, talks fondly of Hitler, verbally insulting).
Sound-generating Pushpin
After BYOR night I started experimenting and forming tiny sound sculptures built on the head of a pushpin- the idea came from the cheap accessibility of making LED Throwies and the random fun that comes with harmless graffiti. I took a mini pager motor, a 3 volt battery, some aluminum foil and wire, the pin and of course ducktape and pieced them together:
The sound it generates is kind of a gentle rustling that, when combined with many, forms this great wall of sound. I’d like to take this project and hold an openhack around putting them together and having a shared experience of the sound generated in a park when there are no leaves on the trees. In the meantime I made an instructable on it in case you’d like to do it at home!
Vibrot
A robot that responds to vibrations from an external electronic device, or has that as it’s input to perform it’s functions.
It’s Alive!
Three 9 volt batteries later, the little pump I got at the MIT swap is projectile throwing soon-to-be tears into crybot’s belly. Yesssss!!
Ode To An Abhorrent Water Pump
What you see here is a half-hacked mini aquarium water pump ‘clamped’ to my desk with duck tape and its suction feet helpless to the impending battle bt. Dremel and weird green resin/plastic casing.
What you do not see is my look of utter disgust and defeat while I came to grips with the fact that copious amounts of toxic dust in my lungs and an hour of cutting did not result in a satisfying cracking open of it’s contents, just sparks/smoke/unhackable motor.
….aghah#$%&^@*)!!!!!
Ultra-sensing Pod
A small machine that runs atmospheric/environmental sensors in the background of a situation/event/meeting and can pause it’s information gathering with a push of a button and send a snapshot of information to the web for record making.
Sound Throwie
Modeled after the LED throwie, this device is easily inserted into walls/porous surfaces with it’s pin backing and a mini-pager motor runs it’s rasping aluminum foil wings as it generates tiny brushing sounds.
Sentient Arduino
Some things are too easy- I googled Arduino code for PIR sensor, clicked the first on the list, ctrl c + ctrl v’d and whamo- a functioning sensing program.
AtmoShirt
A t shirt with xbee/screen sewn in that loads the thoughts entered of a wearer and senses the atmosphere surrounding the wearer to give a portrayal of what the person is experiencing. Could be done as a pin/button that is worn too.
VisuSearch
Allows the selection of different categories of visual elements (ex. background/subject/text/dynamic elements) in order to find an icon/image with a combination of the characteristics. Link the input of elements to the tags in a google image search to return the results.
