Here’s a little project from 1 in 1 for ITP30.

http://cwwang.com/avdrop/

I want people to be able to drop their avatars into an open space and drag as far or close as they want to others. or something like that. here’s something. drop your avatar in and get close to Red.

We rely heavily on our vision to identify change. We see sand accumulating at the bottom of the hourglass. We see the minute hand rotate clockwise. How would our sense of time change if we cast time to another sense?

Thermal Clock is a timepiece that positions heat along a bar over a 24 hour cycle to tell time.

Using an array of peltier junctions, heat is emitted from a focused area moving from left to right along the bar over the course of a day.

Thermal Clock from che-wei wang on Vimeo.

Time is our measure of a constant beat. We use seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, etc. But what if we measured time against rituals, chores, tasks, stories, and narratives? How can we use our memory, prediction, familiar and unfamiliar narratives to tell time?

As a child, I remember using the length of songs as a way to measure how much time was left during a trip. A song was an appropriate period to easily multiply to get a grasp of any larger measure like the time left until we arrived to our grandmother’s place. The length of a song was also a measure I could digest and understand in an instant.

The first iteration of Cinematic Timepiece consists of 5 video loops playing at 5 different speeds on a single screen. The video is of a person coloring in a large circle on a wall.

The frame furthest to the right is a video loop that completes a cycle in one minute. The video to the left of the minute loop completes its cycle in one hour. The next completes in a day, then a month, then a year.

Through various iterations, we intend to experiment with various narratives and rituals captured in a video loop to be read as measures of time.

The software was written in OpenFrameworks for a single screen to be expanded in the future for multiple screens as a piece of hardware.

Cinematic Timepiece is being developed in collaboration with Taylor Levy.

Download the fullscreen app version [http://drop.io/cinematicTimepiece#]

Part One : In a Lifetime

Part Two : Cinematic Timepiece

Part Three : One Hour Sprocket

Part Four : Thermal Clock

Part Five : Counting to a Billion

Part Six : 3.16 Billion Cycles

Six timekeeping devices were built as part of my thesis project at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at TISCH, NYU.

Counting to a Billion is a device created to fulfill the desire to count. The electronics consists of a microcontroller, a speech module, and a speaker powered by a rechargeable battery. There is no/off switch. The voice will keep counting when the device is unplugged and if the battery is drained, the count will pick up where it left off when the battery recharges. The voice begins counting at one, two, three and continues counting up until it reaches one billion at which point in time it will stop.

If it took a second to utter each string of numbers, it would take 1 billion seconds or 31.7 years for the device to reach its end. But since it takes more than a second to vocalize many of the numbers in the sequence, it may take upwards of 60 years to complete.

The unit is housed in a solid block of aluminum, cnc milled into a vessel that was designed to withstand substantial abuse over many years.

Counting to a Billion is for sale as an edition of 5.

Materials: Aluminum, custom electronics
Dimensions: 4” (10cm) diameter, 6” (15cm) height, freestanding

Counting to a Billion from che-wei wang on Vimeo.

One Hour Sprocket is a wall-mounted 12 hour clock with a 60 tooth sprocket attached to a motor, completing one revolution every hour. From the sprocket hangs a chain that consists of 720 links. Each link accounts for every minute of a 12 hour cycle. Among the black chain links is one polished stainless steel link to identify the position of the hour past 12 o’clock. To tell time one can estimate the position of the “hour hand” or count the number of links from the polished link to the top of the clock for a more accurate reading.

Between two 1/4” steel plates, sits a stepper motor, which ticks every 18 seconds. The hanging chain jiggles with each tick reassuring the clock’s functionality.

1 Hour Sprocket Clock is for sale as an edition of 20

Sparkfun ads featuring momo in the January issue of Circuit Cellar, the Feb issue of Servo and March issues of Make and Nuts & Volts

Behind the scenes, the phone system is using quicktate.com’s api to transcribe speech to text and a custom php script to deliver the confession to twitter.

Who do you have a crush on?
Did you lie today?
Who do you secretly hate?
Who do you secretly love?
Who do you envy?
Have you cheated?
How much was your last tip?
What’s the dirtiest thing you’ve ever done?
Do you secretly like KFC?
How about that hair in your bf’s back?
Do you pick your nose with your gf’s tweezers?
What sites you visit when you are home alone?
Did you really miss the train? really?
Do you like tomato based sauces?
Do you cheat on crosswords?
Did you eat junk food everyday?
Did you finish your room mates’s milk again?
Are you really taking the pill?
Do you like her apartment?
Did you change your underwear today?
What teacher would you have an affair with?

Leave a confession and get on with your day.

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with Celina Alvarado

P.Life is a large scale interactive screen designed for the IAC’s 120′ wide video wall. In the world of P.Life, Ps run across the 120′ screen frantically moving material from one house to another. Along the way, Ps exchange pleasantries (based on text message inputs) as they pass by each other, offering a helping hand to those in need. The landscape shifts and jolts based on audio input from the audience, tossing Ps into the air. Playful jumps into midair often end in injury, forcing them to crawl until a fellow P comes by to help out.

Features
Text messaging to create new characters of different sizes and dialogues.
Audio input to influence landscape
Performance backend to influence landscape
Ps move with life-like motion as they walk, jump, fall, run skip, crawl, carry boxes, push boxes, etc.
P.Life is written in OpenFrameworks and uses the Most Pixels Ever library

By Che-Wei Wang and Jiaxin Feng
Live Music by Taylor Levy

photos by wuyingxian