Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

This week we took time to attend NYU's ITP Winter Show, where students showcase their innovative thinking through emerging technologies. Here is a sample of projects that we consider highlights.

Seismi{c}ycling

Robert Carlsen’s Seismi{c}ycling is a great example of Humans as Sensors and another innovative crowdsourcing application. Carlsen created an iPhone app that logged location and accelerometer data from his bike rides around NYC. He then created a visualization of the aggregate forces at play during the rides such as turbulence and pauses. The potential here is to open the platform so other people can also passively report things like road conditions, long lights, fastest routes, etc.

Tweetgrass

Tweetgrass is an attempt at encouraging the NYU community to take a pro-active stance on caring for the environment. While last year's Botanicalls project helped a plant communicate, Tweetgrass, in a sense, allows us to talk to plants through Twitter. Users can do a good deed for the environment and then tweet @tweetgrassnyu. These tweets are then transformed into clouds on a monitor. When it is cloudy enough, the digital to real world transformation happens and the community wheat grass is watered.

Sola

Designed by Nobu Nakaguchi, Sola aims to help users "wear their heart on their sleeve." Through sensors wrapped around the body, emotions that aren't necessarily expressed are captured and converted into a digital form. From there they can be sent to social networks and expressed in ways that trigger dialogue with friends and family. Nobu's Twitter account is set up so that when his emotion changes, his profile picture changes accordingly. When discussing his project with us, his wife had texted, commenting on his current state of contentment. It reminds us of Kickabee, the sensor that tweets whenever a baby kicks in its mother's womb.

To view more projects featured at the show visit the official ITP website, and for video coverage of the spring show, click here.