Samar H's and Alex J's Mouse Hack

Alex J and Samar H created a project called DO NOT OPEN, referring to the privacy stickers so often placed on journals or personal files. The project is a book that exclaims, "No! I Said no! Nooooooooooooooooooo!" and "Don't open me!" when you open its two covers. Speakers and a mouse chip are inside the fake book, and 'wires' made of aluminum foil and gold leaf form connections that activate the book to talk when one disrupts those connections by opening the flaps.

The concept was to test existing notionsof privacy and curiosity. e.g. when one finds a jounral on the ground, one is tempted to read it, but also driven by thier conscience to respect privacy and not open it. DO NOT OPEN manifests the inner thoughts of guilt that run through anyone's mind when opening a document, text or otherwise that is probably not privy to thier eyes.

Linda L & Winnie K's Final Project

It's a record player with a selection of nostalgic songs from our generation. The code was created with Processing. Each time the user presses the button, it scrolls through a list of 10 songs in order. Once the array is finished, it returns to the very first one, continuing where it was left off.

Source Code

Jonathan Seguin's Mouse Hack

Minesweep!

I had a lot of trouble deciding what I wanted to do for my mouse hack. I had a variety of ideas involving creating some sort of novelty by re-purposing the mouse as a different, but pre-existing object: a guitar, a windmill, a piano, so on and so forth. All of these ideas I felt were clever in a technical aspect, but none of them left me feeling satisfied with the end experience. So for my project I set out to develop an experience instead of a technically complex hack.

The idea I came up with was to re-purpose the mouse as a mine detector. I felt the experience of walking through a mine field, where one false step could mean your end, created a very tense and exhilarating environment for game play.

The game functioned as follows:

• Players would navigate through a space with boundaries set in the form of a rectangle.
• The goal would be to make it from one end of the space to the other end without running into any mines.
• Players however would not be given any visual cues to where the mines were planted. Originally the plan was to blind fold participants in order to have them focus on using their other senses (hearing).
• As players approached a mine with their mine detector, a beeping noise would play. The closer a player moves to a mine the fast the beeping would play.
• By using the beeping sound players should be able to navigate carefully to the other side without meeting their dooms.

Additionally I decided it would be good for those observing to be able to monitor the situation more clearly so they could see whether or not their contestant was poised for doom. This actually created another form of feedback for the player to take heed of. The level of anxiety in the audience is directly expressed to the player as they move through the field giving them another way to gauge how well they're doing.

Projected opposite the back of the player is an overview of the player's position and mine positions.

In terms of improvements there are a few obvious things I would like to address:

• Install a mouse friendly surface for contestants to play on. Tracking the player's movements on a dirty floor was one of the major elements that detracted from this experience.
• Adding a timer: If a timer was included it opens up the option for either a scoreboard, so that players can compete against each other's times; or an additional mode of difficulty such that players need to reach the end of the field within a certain time frame.
• Stronger Visuals: I felt that the visuals were more of a rough prototype and that there was much room for improvement. Perhaps a better reward screen for completing the challenge, and perhaps implementing a camera to capture the reactions of contestants when have blown themselves up.

Cristal's Mouse Hack Suspenders

For my mouse hack project, I was extremely interested in movement creating sound, particularly dance moves making beats. The idea of how that would happen changed a few times, but I knew I wanted it to be wearables. Originally I had thought of extending the buttons into shoes that could be stepped on or a belt that would create beats with the movement of hips. It took a bit of time and quite a bit of brainstorming to come up with suspenders.


 

I extended the left and right buttons, attaching a ball tilt switch to each. The ball tilt switches were sewn to the approximate location of the top of the shoulders. The board was sewn to the center of the Y of the suspenders, so that the wires wouldn't be pulled as much. Then in Processing: left-click played a snare drum sample and the right-click played a bass kick sample. Sometimes the tilt switches were very sensitive and sometimes they weren't responsive at all. If I were to redo this project, I'd probably try a different type of switch that might be more consistent or position the tilt switch differently.



In the future, I hope to expand on this project, using a keyboard hack, so that there can be more sample sounds to allow people to produce a song by moving more parts of the body.

The Kill Button (Mouse Hack) - Connors Eilersen

Have you ever been working with a computer, and no matter what you do it doesn't want to cooperate? It is from this problem that the Kill Button is born.

My previous idea for a mouse hack was to make a simulated pipe organ using multiple mice in sequence, which are then controlled by the processing library ProControl. However, after much coding being done on my desktop, i decide to test it on my laptop (the machine i was going to use to present it), and the computer refused to respond to multiple mice inputs. After many hours of banging my head against a brick wall (metaphorically of course), I decided to change my focus.

The Kill Button, the spawn of my anger and frustration towards technology that refuses to listen to me, if my project for the mouse hack. When it is plugged in, it runs some code that causes a digitized face to appear on the screen. When the big red button is pressed, it causes to computer to enter an immediate state of shutdown. However, while you are deciding to press it, the computerized face tries to convince you to not "murder" it. The voice for the computer are composed of sampled clips from the video game Portal. The piece is a commentary on how reliant we are on technology and artificial intelligence. The piece if heavily reliant on the back story, in which anger at technology caused a device to be created that essential kills the machine.

Curtis Poad's Paper and Motors

For the papers and motor project, I decided to make an origami lego man head and combine it onto a rotating platform that uses a motor and a couple led lights. I wanted this to be like a beacon or lighthouse but disguised as a lego man. It actually turned out pretty creepy than what I intended. I wanted to make this as a representation of my childhood and love of lego when I was younger. The led lights that I used act in the same way that a lighthouse would when the head rotates. The biggest challenge for me was learning how to make this origami structure.

For improvement I would add more paper body parts to complete this lego man and alsohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif include more motors to make the arms and legs move. Video can be found here.

Melissa's Mouse Hack

What is Pretty?

My mouse hack evolved several times throughout the duration of this project. One of the evolving elements being theme, in the end the main theme for the project ended up being feminism and what is considered beautiful in today's society.

There are three projected images, one of me without make-up, one with make-up, and the final photoshopped. All of the images include my mouth being covered with a blindfold. The first image reads "Will I be pretty?", the second "Will I be smart?" and the third "When can I be both?" When the eyeliner (attached to the sheet) is touched to the projection it changes to the second image. When the mascara is touched to the projection it changes to the third image, and the blue button sets it back to the first image. There is also a track that plays that is a mix between different feminists speaking about beauty and the feminist movement. The first speaker in the track is a dub poet named Katie Makkai with the beginning of her poem called "Pretty", the second a key player in the feminist movement in the 1950's Betty Freidan speaking on CBC about Women, and the third another dub poet named Staceyann Chin speaking about equality in today's society. If I were to take this project further I would have had the track relate to the movement of the images better so there could be more of a connection.

There are different messages the viewer can take away from this piece whether it being that women can feel silenced by their lack of society's idea of beauty, or that they feel silenced by fitting into society's idea of beauty. My hope is that the piece relates to the viewer based on their experiences.

I think that this interface works much better than my original one where the viewer touched the mascara and eyeliner to a mirror placed on a box. This connects the images and objects much better.

Click here to play the audio from the piece.

Kalytta's TOUCH & IMMERSIVE reading light

Watch my working (!) project in action [here]

This is a redo of my failed hack of the mouse's sensor. I found out that the optical sensor would not be able to sense being covered and uncovered (light and dark) since it senses when there has been movement across a surface.

PS. from previous problems of not being able to log into this blog, my PAPER & MOTORS and OBJECT & AUDIO projects were blogged [here]

Kathryn Barrett's Mouse Hack Final Project

Based on the quote by Andy Warhol: "In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes" I decided to emphasize the effect of time and the idea of fame. Using a 15 minute sand hour glass, I wanted to create an environment where someone had the ability to prove their identity to the world - coming into the whole thing completely unprepared. The idea that fame comes in all forms (talent, embarrassment, who you know, what you say, etc.) I had intended for people to choose their words, therefore grasping that they held complete control (opposed to doing something by accident and getting caught on film, for example). The hour glass proved to be a pressuring object; watching the sand quickly fall through and creating a "nail biting" experience.

For the actual installation, I wanted to have both physical and digital aspects. The hour glass sat on the table, and once flipped over, would start a video (via Processing) on one projector. On a second projector, and empty word processing document stayed open, allowing the person who flipped the hour glass, to begin typing anything that they thought would make them famous. Ideally, the person would be writing for 15 minutes (until the hour glass was empty). I was on the fence about whether or not to have the writing aspect public or not. I eventually decided to use the projection so everyone could see - since it best represented the quote and it would be interesting in a gallery full of strangers.

For the actual mouse hack, I used a mercury tilt switch to initiate the video via mouse click on Processing.

Here is the video it played:

Here is the setup of the two projections - The word processing document on the left, and the video playing at the same time (for the duration of the 15 minutes, and corresponding with the physical hour glass on the table) on the right.

If I were to improve this project, I would love for people to show their talents in more forms than just writing. It would be interesting to see what people decided to draw in 15 minutes, or offer to say in 15 minutes (a speech?). It would create a neat bond between complete strangers.

Phuong D and Konstantino K’s Mouse Hack

Our mouse hack, which we’ve entitled “LightWeight,” attempts to bring the property of mass to light itself. Recalling a short passage by Yoko Ono read to us in the beginning of the semester, which asked participants to capture sunlight in a bag, we explored how we could bring a more tangible manifestation to the movement of light and how a person could manipulate its direction.

In our initial brainstorming, we envisioned a cube where users could shake and rotate it as they please, causing embedded lights to move with the cube as though they were a bottled liquid. For aesthetic reasons, we tweaked the idea for a pyramid (pictured lower left), and eventually into a short triangular prism for technical reasons. We realized that to have two separate axis for users to control, there would be some difficulties in the circuit design. Namely, each LED would be linked to two separate circuits and there would need to be two mice (for X motions and Y motions respectively).

Deciding that three-dimensional manipulation would be a bit too ambitious for this project, we worked with motion on a purely two-dimensional arena. On the first layer of our prism, a mouse shifts by the way the user tilts the piece.

We purchased a miniature mouse to maximize the motion on our relatively limited surface. The top enclosure of the mouse was removed, and its sides were hacked off from the bottom of the enclosure to maintain a low profile. This was important for the next layer of our piece, where we introduced a ceiling for the mouse.

The majority of the structure is built with foam core.

The ceiling is a separate triangular piece that we insert into the middle of LightWeight. Its first function is to prevent the mouse from jumping upward: we found that once the mice coordinates were read on the software side, jumps caused erratic and unusable readings (more on the software in a bit). Its second use was to separate it from the LED array we built, as the mouse’s laser introduced an undesirable light source of its own. We made sure that the ceiling was easily removable so that we could access the mouse without destroying the top layer in testing and for future use.

The top layer comprised of 10 white LEDs that we purchased from Active Surplus (for $1.00 each, which is irregularly expensive for an LED). Each LED was equipped with a standard 1K resistor, and each had its positive side fed into a pin on our Arduino dedicated to the individual LED. The negative sides were daisy chained and fed into one of the ground terminals in the Arduino. Like the mouse’s ceiling piece, we made sure that the top layer was also easily removable by implementing pull-up straps on its sides.

To interface the mouse with our LEDs, we used a USB Host Shield designed by sparkfun.com, purchased at Creatron. Like any Arduino shield, the USB Host Shield conveniently sits atop the Arduino through stackable connector pins. A single USB port sits at the edge of the board where the mouse is plugged in. In our picture above, you can also see the tangle of wires, each of which comes from one of our LEDs (with the exception of the blue ground wire, which comes from all of them).

On the software side, we had to install three libraries for the USB Host Shield to function correctly. These were Spi (Serial Peripheral Interface), Max3421e (which is named after the main microchip on the Host Shield), as well as a USB library.

While testing the information the mouse gave us, we learned that the raw coordinate values provided were fairly sensitive, circumstantial, and mostly unpredictable. To resolve these issues, we created a simple algorithm that read the raw coordinates and made them more “readable.” Among other things, we made the values add or subtract to themselves as the mouse moved so we could envision its point in space (here we created an actual X and Y coordinate – before, the mouse values compared themselves to the previous moment). Finally, we created a set of statements that determined which lights would turn on based on where the mouse was shifted.

To finish the physical design, we covered the LED array with parchment paper (to diffuse the glow of the lights) and a blue sheet of plastic transparency. The end result is an object that can be held and played with by the user to manipulate the flow of light. In future iterations, we would like to work on a three-dimensional plane as previously stated, and include several more LEDs to create a more organic and naturalistic aesthetic.

Curtis Poad's Mouse Hack

For my mouse hack project, I decided I wanted to play with the idea of combining a musical instrument with visuals that respond based on what the person is playing. I ended up using my own snare drum and made a program that would create ripples of coloured rings each time you hit the drum.

The mouse is located underneath the drum and has two wires coming up the side with one attatched to the drum skin surface and the other attatched to the underside of the drum silencer pad. Both wires have tin foil connected to them so when the player hits the drum, the two pieces of tin foil connect and trigger the rings to appear on screen.

To take this project further, I would make an entire drum kit trigger different visuals depending on what piece of the drum kit you hit. Also I would make it more dynamic by changing the triggering devices and allow for different visuals depending on how hard you hit the drums.

Jessica Ren's Mouse Hack Project

Melting Glacier - For this project I've created a time lapse based on the effects of global warming and climate change in rapid speed, as it is recorded by camera. The glacier travels half a meter per day, according to this there would be very little ice in the North Pole in less than a few decades. The Time Machine allows you to fast forward in time to see the movement of the ice melt into the ocean by pushing the lever in one direction. If given more time and money to create the project, I would use more expensive materials like metal casing and power switch to control the actual time machine. Enhancement on the appearance of the machine as well as on the illusion of a real piece of mechanic that enables you to travel in time.

Mouse Hack - Sherilyn Fernandes & Jenny Ramroop

For our mouse hack, we created a television remote control that had the up and down function of a normal control to change channels. We created a tv in scratch, and added images, that change as you click up and down. Right click controlled the "down" button, and left click controlled "up". Our concept was to show how the things on t.v. impact people. We tried to cover issues like violence, sex, drugs, nature, life, love etc..

If we had more time and the money to enhance our project we would create video instead of images and have an actual remote instead of cardboard box. We will also do more work to enhance the concept so that the issue becomes more clear.

RE-Do of Audio and Object

Here are some photos of the new interface for my Twitter Birds project, it works exactly the same with the speakers inside the birdcage.

I will have to add documentation of my mouse hack later as it broke on the way home and I'll have to get more solder to fix it :(

Here are the photos!

Samar's Audio Project

For the audio part of my project I used an arabic drum beat to express the culture I grew up in throughout my life (I created one of the drum layers myself). A north American song and a french song flow in and out of the song to express the other cultures that were in and out of my life until this point. For my object I used an old arabic drum that I have had in my bedroom my whole life, in whatever country I lived in. The drum broke during one of my moves and was taped back together with moving tape, I chose to leave the tape on the drum to emphasize my moving a lot when growing up. If I had a million dollars to make this project I would fill a big room with drums, drums sticking out of the walls, on the ground, and a much bigger central drum in the middle of the room. My audio would be playing in the background and viewers would be able to interact with the piece by playing their own pieces on the available drums.