Posted: June 1st, 2006 | Author: amos
The M2M Mobile Museum Guide is a proposal done in collaboration with Jared Lamenzo and Shagun Singh to allow visitors to the American Museum of Natural History to augment their museum experience using Sony’s Playstation portable console.
Due to space constraints, the museum is only able to display limited information about any exhibit. Furthermore, at any given time, only a small fraction of the museum’s collection can be displayed. Through a partnership with Sony, the M2M Mobile Museum Guide will create rich interactive experiences that bring to life the valuable artifacts in the museums possession in a way that engages and enhances the educational experience latent in each exhibit.
Visitors will be able to delve deeper into the topics touched upon in the exhibits. With the M2M Mobile Museum Guide, students can play educational games with other students, like treasure hunts in the museum’s collection, take fun quizzes that cover the core topics of each exhibit, bookmark favorite artifacts on display and later retrieve that list of favorites with links to more information about each artifact on the museum’s website.
Posted: January 1st, 2006 | Author: amos
Needies are interactive plush dolls inspired by codependent, high-maintenance relationships. Each Needie has a custom-developed electronic nervous system that they use to talk, sing, and feel hugs. Needies communicate with each other verbally and wirelessly.
Totally attention-starved, they compete with each other for human affection — or, getting touch, as they like to say.
When you give Needies touch (by hugging and squeezing them), they will return your kindness with songs and shameless flattery.
But remember that Needies always know when other Needies are getting touch! If one Needie is getting touch while others are neglected, the unloved Needies will conspire to take its place.
Kelly holding Mossie
Links
The official Needies site
Needies in the press
Posted: July 15th, 2005 | Author: amos
Natalie Jeremijenko contacted us one week before the opening of the Save the Robots festival in Dublin. She had been commissioned by The Ark to create a series of Robot Ducks that festival goers could use to communicate with the real ducks in the pond at St. Stephen’s Green in central Dublin.
Working under duress, we express-ordered plastic decoy ducks used for hunting, and then set about re-purposing them to become vehicles for greater duck-human communication. Using small audio/video transceivers, we embedded a camera, microphone, and speaker inside of each duck that could be viewed and controlled wirelessly from laptops in the park. Users could also use a handheld remote-control motor system embedded inside each duck to maneuver it around the pond. This turned out to be a big success in Dublin.
Robot Ducks featured in Res Magazine
Duck picnic before departure for Dublin
Permit this family to drive ducks
Robot duck playing hard to get in Dublin
Posted: April 1st, 2004 | Author: amos
Pac-Manhattan is a large-scale urban game that utilizes the New York City grid to recreate the 1980’s video game sensation Pac-Man. This analog version of Pac-man is being developed in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications graduate program, in order to explore what happens when games are removed from their “little world” of tabletops, televisions and computers and placed in the larger “real world” of street corners, and cities.
Pac-Manhattan revolutionized the field of location-based gaming. It has been picked up and played by teams across the globe.
Links
The official Pac-Manhattan site
Pac-Manhattan in the press