We picked Andy Ryan’s photograph of Marvin Minsky’s home to illustrate some of these concepts:

We then explored ways to use computer vision to capture information about where people were looking and where they were positioned, relative to the piece. This is a short demo of how we might capture and process viewer data, using facial recognition software and the front-facing camera on an iPhone (the circle is following the movement of Tamer’s face).

Finally, we created a small-scale prototype (of Ryan’s painting) with a layer of clear thermochromic paint, which revealed different parts of the image based on where the viewers were situated. This is a short demo of how this paint could help us change the colors dynamically and direct focus to different areas.

(Last audio sample in this clip was Minsky himself)

Team: Tamer Deif, Shruti Dhariwal, Clara Lee, Jeremy Finch
Thanks to Prof Hiroshi Ishii, Penny Webb, Dan Fitzgerald and Udayan Umapathi

There have been many projects that connect heartrates or other biometric readings to wearable “tangible” output or other people. See

http://www.thetouchx.com/index.html#Home

The idea of discretizing interactions with 4D printed devices by freezing cubes of reactants/solvents is interesting. Keep developing.

P.S. I did the code to print the Harvard flowers – can help with 4D printing.

-Dan

Udayan’s comment: Enough work has been done in the past on connecting heartrate to a physical output and so on. But, you could build up on other interaction scenarios and it could be interesting. Take a look a this inflatable jacket and this helmet. Maybe you can build on top of these existing objects by defining more concrete scenarios within the space of transformable objects.

The morphing over time idea is a good direction, but why ice cubes? This direction similar to the previous one needs more concrete scenario.

Website: www.jeremyafinch.com
Email: finchj@mit.edu