Final Project Brainstorming

My initial brainstorming for the final project:

--Inspired by the classes discussion during midterm project critique about those sensors which make people aware of information that is normally unseen, I became interested in electromagnetic field detection. The EM fields are generated by most any devise that produces an electric charge. The ubiquitous nature of modern devise means that EM fields are present most anywhere. The artist Troika designed a devise which allows the user to hear the EM field in the general area as tones, http://troika.uk.com/electroprobe. I considered adopting this method of detection into a wearable head device that allows the user to hear a stereo feed of the immediate surrounding EM field as falling rain, falling rain I hope would reference the ever present nature of EM fields. Areas of denser EM activity would sound like hard rain and wind passing by the user. The device would have depended on a circular array of EM sensors which would determine the quality of sounds heard by the user. EM sensors are interesting in that they can be built from simply an exposed circuit which produces a faint charge when in the vicinity of an em field. Computer use a EM shield to prevent the possibility of surrounding EM field effective performance. I found an simple tutorial on how to design such a simple EM detector using just a arduino, LED and a piece of wires, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Bke3750WE. Here's a video that helped my get excited about the subject aswell:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zGnfL_Cc7M

--Another idea involved robotics and USB memory sticks provided by the audience. The concept is still rough,but I had planned on designing a simple robot capable of connecting with a couple USB memory sticks provide by audience members who happen to have them. The information on the sticks would by read by the bot which would then react to particular words and information formats on the memory sticks. The bot could speak the name of files or move according to the size of files. I realized the functionality was far out of my league and the concept was loose. I wanted to address the fact that people today carry around pockets of information everywhere they go and that this information is so distinct for each person. The sensor portion of the project would be simply a tool for use in the robots movements, wall detection. I still plan on developing the idea further.

--The project I presented for my final came from a desire to display a bank of strange and older video recording on a monitor according to the position of the viewer. My profound lack of programming skills caused this idea to shift into using simply images stills as a stop motion display that functioned according to the proximity of the viewer.