Tag: computation

Got my illuminator kit in the mail from Ramsey Electronics. The device throws out a great amount of infrared light in a focussed beam. Time to build took about an hour, and the kit cost me $35 or something. Good alternative to security illuminators costing hundreds.

As you can see above, the IR reflects off of the acrylic sheet I’m using as a playfield and creates a giant flare in the camera image (see the laptop screen). An issue to solve with this will be to have the IR light travel through the playfield, but reflect (without a giant flare) off the pieces. In addition to these considerations, I’ll still have to project onto the thing.

After taking an interest in quarter football, I considered the idea of using coins, something everyone has in their pockets, as game pieces. This could also provide a built-in incentive system for players if certain gameplay events result in opponents taking your money!

Unfortunately, the technical tests resulted in less-than-successful results. The coins were unable to reliably reflect light from an infrared LED into an IR camera over a sufficient area to allow for an engaging gameplay experience.

click to enlarge

Fire and Ice is the gameplay mechanic I hope to explore with the Physically Augmented Computer Game. Its a simple shuffleboard-style game using physical pucks that are slid into the center of the board. After crossing the blue or orange lines, your puck either catches fire or freezes (virtually). If a fire piece knocks an ice piece, they cancel each other out. The goal of the game would be to finish 10 turns with the most fire or ice pieces left in the playfield.

Feedback: Fire and Ice motif should be kicked up more. A subtle narrative could be employed to create a sense of urgency. For example, its Earth you’re trying to heat up or cool down.

The idea of that also gives a clear visual indicator of what the object of the game is (hit the earth)…. while strategy will come in later. With the original idea, its kind of unclear as to what you want to do on the first turn.

Aimless Ambition + Reeling & Rambunctious (link)

POST-MORTEM POSITIVITY IS ABOUT VISUALIZING the good that people wish to do after their death. Using the dataset of the text taken from all the obituaries published in the United States for a given year, the system will search out the names of organizations that the decased will be leaving donations for either directly or as requested by families in memorial of the deceased. The 3d visualization will map the most popular charities to the age of the deceased on the Z axis, with the age (in discreet ranges) of the deceased on the X, and the number of deceased of a given age range giving to a particular charity on the Y axis.

SCALE:
population of USA: 298,444,215
death rate: 8.26/1,000 = 0.8%/year
annual deaths: ~2.4 Million deaths/year
annual deaths to nearest power of 10: 1,000,000
estimate number of deaths with obituaries (power of 10): 1%
number of organizations listed in two days of obits on legacy.com: 8/20 = 40%
number of organizations to nearest power of 10: 10%
estimate number of charities donated to (power of 10): 100
1,000,000 * .01 * .10 / 100 = 10 donations/charity/year

based on this estimate, I figure there would be enough data to visualize for a given year. If my calculations are high, I would add the ability to visualize data from more than one year at a time.

Visually, the 3d bar graphs will be gray on a green background to evoke gravestones, but with more lively and optimistic accent colours, like yellow (angelic) and baby blue (to symbolize new life).

NOTES ON DATA MINING:

SKETCH: