ITP Winter Show 2008

December 30, 2008

I have visited the ITP program at NYU several times, but it never ceases to be overwhelming. There were over 100 exhibitions in the Winter 2008 show and the space as always was very crowded. I had a great time and I shot a little video as well.

The last time I attended a show at ITP was a few years back, and one of the main differences this year seemed to be the preponderance of apps, like Twiterra that depended upon Web APIs such as Twitter. For geocoding, Twiterra leverages an open-source Java library, NASA World Wind. I was, as always, impressed to see how deeply students who were previously non-developers, were able to delve into some fairly arcane technology in a short time.

Video: Nerdabout visits the ITP 2008 Winter Show

There were abstract pieces such as Heart Has Its Own Reason which visualizes one's heart beat while talking on the phone, and the Living Shade, which filters light in a way meant to mimic sunlight filtering through leaves. Likewise the Headbanger Phones are a fascinating, fun device with no immediate practical application.

Another less-than-practical techology was Little Protests, a subversive fortune cookie factory. My favorite feature of Little Protests was that the digital label printer used to create the fortunes was built for less than ten dollars.

Developing therapeutic devices is a core activity at ITP. The Cosmic Hand Dance Actualization Machine uses sound and light to encourage users to excercise and flex their hand muscles. For anyone interested in building one of these, there is a blog with videos and technical info.

Building nonstandard controllers for software, is another core activities of the ITP program. The most bizarre controllers though, had to be the Gus urban chimes. These are wind chimes that are designed to be silent to your neighbors. Instead Arduinos are used to sense wind speed, triggering a speaker inside your apartment to play recordings of Balinese chimes.

For me, one of the highlights of this show was that I got to talk a bit with professor Tom Igoe. I was interested to hear that lately there seem to be a few more Web developers joining the ITP program. He has some interesting insights on the attitudes that enterprise programmers need to unlearn, in order to program for embedded applications. For instance, here are two of the guidelines Tom offers to developers:

1. Don't write a platform.
2. Don't solve the general case.

Indeed, much of what's interesting about ITP projects is that they are very simple. People who build Web applications for a living are used to living with complexity and I can imagine that it would take some amount of readjustment before one started coming up with elegant but highly specific hardware hacks, like the Kickbee which simply posts I kicked mommy to Twitter every time an Arduino-driven sensor detects your baby kicking inside your womb. It is an indescribably cute invention.

It turns out Corey Menscher, the creator of the KickBee, is a very senior JavaScript developer. Once we got on the topic of JavaScript, Corey told me about his another project he has worked on: GeoGenius. The app (which runs on iPhone) is written entirely in JavaScript. He decided a semester wasn't enough time to learn Objective-C. But as a Web developer he felt comfortable jumping into the PhoneGap JavaScript API for iPhone; which exposes iPhone or iTouch hardware features (like accelerometer data) to the JavaScript DOM.

GeoGenius was just one of several location aware applications. I also enjoyed talking to the creators of Gmissile, a massively multiplayer realtime strategy game set on a Google Map of the players' neighborhood. Also very amusing was the "activity-based meetup service," A Little Awkward, where you can find other people who happen to be near you and doing the same thing as you, and gatherings are only expected to last a few minutes.

Break the Wall was another massively multiplayer game where many, many, clicks triggered one swing of a diminutive wrecking ball into a tiny brick wall. This evoked for me the use of miniatures in special effects, such as Peter Jackson sailing his lipstick camera through the streets of a miniature Minas Tirith.

I also ran into Jeremy Rotsztain next to the Bumpbots. He had been a presenter at the last Dorkbot NYC so it was great to get a second chance to talk to him and hear more about his Action Painting project; which as I understand it is a C framework geared toward analyzing 80s and 90s action films in order to abstract movement as color and pattern.

On the way out I stopped to talk to the multimedia performers Semiotech. I got a run through of the technology incorporated into their costumes, and checked out the shadow puppet theatre. For Semiotech the controllers and other technology were completely bound up in the narratives of their performance. When I think of technology-as-story my mind goes immediately to graphics and games, so it was refreshing to be presented with another perspective on using computers to tell a stories.

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