Experiments
This is a collection of small experiments and explorations with Haptics or Machine Learning, but were not big enough projects to warrant their own process pages.
Haptic Experiment 1
Changing form not material
I worked on changing the haptic experience of an object without changing the material. I worked on melting jolly ranchers (after having a large amount of leftovers from Occupy Earth) into various different shapes to alter the haptic experience of the eating experience.
People who ate them enjoyed the penne shaped jolly rancher the best, since they could play with it more with their tongue than the original jolly. Many found the long stick version to be too sharp, and the spiral to be too breakable. However, all three successfully created a different experience than the original jolly rancher.
Haptic Experiment 2
Changing experience through adding material
I worked on enhancing the original function of the object through adding another material to the object. For this I was frustrated with how binder clips were sometimes difficult to open as the clip size got larger, there was not enough torque added to the handles for ease of use.
For this experiment I laser cut ⅛ inch acrylic to add to the binder clip handles, and played with different forms of the laser cut to see if it made it easier to use. People liked the aesthetics of the version that was a rectangle with a hole cut out of the center. They said it would make a cool purse handle. Also, people liked the V shaped handles because they were fun to use, and made nice sounds. The horizontal solid rectangle was still somewhat difficult to use and was slightly awkward to hold.
Machine Learning Experiment 1
Satelliscopes
This was a collaborative performance project created with Jackie Wu and Nathaniel Hoe. Due to being in a digital age, and making a critique on surveillance, I wanted to play with the idea of satellites in the sky forming a new age horoscope. I began this idea with the fact that a Russian satellite was the brightest “star” now in the sky, and what it means to people to have divination from the stars.
For this created horoscope drawings from modern technology, such as a kindle, iPhone, Roomba, etc. Then from those line drawings, I used stars in the sky to get peoples GPS satellite positions on the day and location they were born. We had a script that took a screenshot of the positions and then ran a processing script to create dots and connecting lines between the dots to create an image. From there we used a image categorization algorithm that we trained on our original satellite drawings on Wekinator, to categorize the “star” sign of the person getting their divination told to them. From there we gave personality traits based on their new star sign, and Nathan created other divinations/predictions based on this knowledge through performance.
To further advanced this project we are trying to train the algorithm based off Cosmo and other teen magazines horoscopes to try to be able to create horoscopes of its own.