Sparkfun Photoshoot in Vegas with Critical Corset

Sparkfun Photoshoot in Vegas with Critical Corset
Originally uploaded by geekphysical

Our ad with Sparkfun.com, the fantastic trip to Vegas for a photoshoot on the strip has been released!

Even though we had had 2 hours sleep in 2 days, we, and I'm quite sure, some photoshop retouching, managed to turn geeking sexy with the Critical Corset - a corset which tightens when you're attracted to someone and your heart rate rises.

This was a fantastic trip and we had so much fun and it was great to show off the critical corset and all the mad machinery and programming behind it! See post below to get the whole story!

LED Art

We needed an interesting father's day gift so we resurrected an old project, the LED art piece. Basically, 64 LEDs are soldered together, creating a grid. The programmed microcontroller displays a 64 X 64 photograph, edited for high contrast, black and white, and scrolls and zooms the photo across the 64 leds, each one lighting in turn to create the image. Video here: http://blip.tv/file/2301057/

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Twinkle, Twinkle, little LED...

Sequence LEDs
Originally uploaded by geekphysical

Sequence lighting LEDs was the project here, with an on/off toggle and tons of LEDs that needed to be lit for an exhibit. Beautiful video here!

ABB Robot's heart!

ABB Robot's heart.
Originally uploaded by geekphysical

The adventures of repairing, and reverse engineering the giant 1 ton ABB robot continues. Endless wires, insane programming, 5 axis of rotation and the tin man has almost got his heart!

Finally, we have achieved communication, controlling the axis from the computer AND getting positioning feedback...we're on our way!

In the news....

As part of completion for a Masters in Interaction Design, Vanessa set up a table at the Business to Buttons Conference in Malmo this week. The booth was made to show how easy tangible computing and rapid prototyping can be!

We made a simple interaction, a transistor intertwined with a LED, hooked up to a 9v, powered by people acting as the human resistor. It was a beautiful little interactive exhibit than literally ANYONE could make and even the Swedish news got excited about - see article here: Sydsvenskan.se We also posted up a little diagram of the LED/Transistor trick on Flickr, here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8517602@N08/3581856707/

GeekPhysical + SparkFun, IN VEGAS!

So our "Critical Corset" (http://illutron.dk/posts/170) has received some attention. One of our focuses in the projects we do is of course, the "Physical" so how can we create interactions based on the physical body?



The corset project, in a nutshell, senses when the wearer's heart rate rises, and then tightens the corset, indicating to the wearer that they are attracted to someone. Of course, heart rate isn't the only signifier and as we discovered, is obviously affected by many other things, (hence we developed a super awesome biometric social interaction system which I'll post about later but...) in the meantime, Sparkfun heard about us. Sparkfun is the supplier of all wonderful electronic goodies that the world plays with and so it was great to hear from them, being interested in our project! It was even more great to learn that they wanted to do a photoshoot with us, featuring us in Make Magazine, Nuts and Volts, and two other superbly geeky magazines! We flew off to Vegas, had a GREAT four days with them, managed to geek, talk geek, and act ridiculously cool in Vegas and had a wonderful time exploring the madness that is Vegas.

We did the photoshoot in the middle of the Vegas strip, with cars whizzing by, Dzl in a Tuxedo with tails and me wearing the corset, and a bag full of electronics, and both of us admiring his MSI laptop. I can't wait to see the photos, and better yet, the ad!

Many thanks to AnnDrea, Nate and Chris, and Vegas! Who knew geeking could be so fantastic!?