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.