Crow’s Flight is a GPS compass app for the Android platform. Enter an address and the GPS compass will continuously update your position and point towards the destination. Distance to the point is displayed in meters or kilometers along with a visual distance gauge. More info over at cwwandt.com/crows-flight

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#]

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.

A 60 rpm (revolutions per minute) motor drives the entire mechanism. It rotates once every second. The following pulley rotates once every 5 seconds (1:5 ratio). The next rotates once every 60 seconds or 1 minute. Then 5 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 month, 1 year, and 1 decade. The decade wheel carries the load of the large arc. The large arc rotates once every century. The final ratio between the 60 rpm motor and the large arc is approximately 1:31.6 billion.

Each wheel is marked with a black nut to highlight a position that could be tracked over time. Along the arc, 100 lines mark the divisions of each passing year. When the clock finally reaches the end of a 100 year cycle, the arc falls off its track onto the floor.

3.16 Billion Cycles is for sale as an edition of 5.

Materials:Aluminum, AC sync motor, rubber belts.
Dimensions: 46” diameter (107cm), 6” (15cm) deep, wall mouted

3.16 Billion Cycles from che-wei wang on Vimeo.

Special thanks to Julian LaVerdiere, Jessica Banks, Andrew Laska, Dustyn Roberts, Kevin Slavin, Al Zuger, and Milgo Bufkin for all their help.

This display lives at the intersection of digital control and analog output. A matrix of lightbulbs painted with thermochromic paint allows for an image to appear and dissipate analogously to the temperature of each bulb.

The overall effect defies our ordinary understanding of materials and time within technological systems.
In this case, lightbulbs are used for heat and not light. And the refresh rate of an image is constrained to the time it takes for the material of the screen to change temperature.

More on thermochromism here.

Here, we’re using 40 watt bulbs. They take a few seconds to warm up and turn white and a couple minutes to cool down and fade back to black.

Built by Alex Abreu, Taylor Levy, and Che-Wei Wang

Thanks to the dozens and dozens of you who helped make this project possible!

Thermochromic Display from che-wei wang on Vimeo.

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.

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

Turf Bombing is a location-based war game which rewards and encourages traveling to and learning about different neighborhoods.

Teams are assigned by the zip code of your home address. The goal of each team is to gain as much territory as possible.

Territories are acquired as players plant time bombs at different locations. If the bomb is not diffused by a local team member in time, the bomb will explode and the territory will be turned over to the team that planted the bomb.

There are 4 ranks within each team. General > Lieutenant > Sergeant > Civilians. Ranks are determined by the number of successful bombing missions. Higher ranking players have more power and influence.

This game requires a laptop and a wifi connection. Your laptop’s wifi connection is used to triangulate your position. Turfbombing does not and never will collect or track any personally identifiable information about you.

Turfbombing.com is in open beta. New features area in the works. Built by Che-Wei Please give feedback.