Our assignment last week was to use Foursquare to log our daily travels. This week, we were asked to use a classmate’s Foursquare check-in history as the source of our visualizations. I was given Bryan Lence’s data and set off to see what was there.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been teaching myself the R “environment for statistical computing and graphics“. It’s an open source project and has a doubly steep learning curve (for me, at least) of an unfamiliar syntax and medium (statistics). I can see it’s power for visualizations, however, when used to reveal interesting associations which can be further refined in other graphics software (in this case, Illustrator).

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This assignment was to develop a concept around a two-screen, live event experience; specifically, using TV and computer via internet. Our group’s concept was a variety-style, Gong Show inspired show with binary voting from viewers to determine via aggregate whether a performance was Fly (a rousing success) or Pie (a miserable failure) which received a whipped cream pie in the face. (We’re a classy outfit here..) (more…)

The source code for the Tesseract OCR for iPhone project has been published. It’s really simple – more of a skeleton, proof-of-concept project than anything else. Still, though, it’s neat to have nearly point-and-shoot text conversion in your pocket.

The project page is: Pocket OCR

The source code is available at github: http://github.com/rcarlsen/Pocket-OCR

There is certainly a lot of improvement to be made. Automatic color correction. Page layout recognition. Perspective correction…the list could go on. The code is there, so…fork away!

(the thumbnail is a bit tongue-in-cheek…but honest. good conversion requires a good source image: well-lit, macro, focused and tightly cropped seems best)

For the 1-in-1 Project as part of ITP’s 30th anniversary celebration I over-engineering the simple bicycle blinky light. Why go for a simple, off-the-shelf blinky light when we can build a much more complicated one ourselves?!

I’m creating an animated display, which changes to solid red while braking.

Update: (5:26) It’s been a long night, but it all came together. I wish I could have finished at the floor, but sometimes you need to go to your cave. The bike blinky light is all I could have asked for…it’s obnoxious, it’s animated, it has a handlebar control to switch to a flashing warning mode. (more…)

This is the final project presentation of BlindSight for the ITP Thinking Physically class in Spring 2009. BlindSight is is a collaboration between Robert Carlsen and Andrew Styer.

BlindSight aims to explore synesthesia by associating certain body positions with visual hallucinations induced by photic stimulation. In other words, flashing lights at various frequencies seems to cause visual patterns to appear for the viewer. Simple wearable sensors adjust the frequency of the flashes and thus provide various patterns. (more…)

While the Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is relatively simple way to program the Arduino hardware, I found myself getting frustrated by it’s limited features after spending time using Xcode and Eclipse. There are some simple tutorials available online which demonstrate how to set up Xcode for programming the Arduino, however these didn’t “just work” for me, and were targeting arduino-0.10.

I made a few (simple in hindsight) changes to the project which has worked well for me so far. (more…)

*(the name of the toy is still under consideration)

SkipDraw
A classic toy reinvented for the active kid of today.

Wear the SkipDraw on your ankle and spin it on the floor around your feet. As it spins, the LED lighted cross will rotate independently. See it draw images of light in mid air as you skip in the center.

Features:

• Encourages kids to play outside of their rooms.
• Promotes physical exercise.
• Can be played indoors or outdoors.
• Compact storage when not in use.
• Is still engaging in daylight or without the batteries.
• Entertaining to watch.

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This evening is the first night of the 2008 Winter Show at ITP. My Cloud Reader project has been included, and I’ll be attending to it each night in the main hallway – surrounded by other really interesting work. The atmosphere on the floor last night was energized…almost like a festival. I’m excited for the show, having come full circle from one year ago when I visited ITP just before applying to the program.

It doesn’t really feel that long ago; it also feels like a long time ago.

It’s going to be a long and exciting day.